T

A few years ago, I signed up on a social networking site for gay men, let's call it Site G (I try to keep things as anonymous as possible).  On Site G, I started to get messages from this guy who was a few years older than me.  His profile didn't have a lot of information on it, and his profile picture was only from the mouth down.  I was just starting out at meeting and talking to people online, so none of this made me stop and think.


Eventually, we exchanged email addresses and started emailing back and forth.  I was a little hopeful that I would get to know his name from these exchanges, but every time a message came in, instead of his name being in the "Sender" section there was only the letter T.  In time, certain things from T made me start to wonder about his actual identity.  Some of the things he said, along with his residency (my college town), his age, and who he lived with (his cousin), started to sound like a former manager that I worked for in college. 


The Manager was always very nice to me, and sometimes, I felt like some of his kindness may have actually been from him having a crush on me (there were always rumors that he was gay, and I wasn't out yet at the time we worked together either).  Maybe it was just me being crazy, but that was what I always thought.  After he quit, he graduated and got a job in a town about an hour away, but he never moved there.  He still lived were he did in college.  I saw him a few times after I had graduated, but we had very short conversations because I was always in a rush to get somewhere else.


Now, back to T.  About the time I noticed the similarities I also noticed how unequal our knowledge of each other was.  He knew what I looked like and much more personal information from my profile since I actually filled mine out.  He also knew my full name from the emails I had sent.  It was my personal email, so my full name showed up in the "Sender" section. 


This is when I decided to do some research.  I started with what I suspected.  If the information that I did know about T didn't match up with The Manager, I had nothing to worry about.  I found a free online people finder and typed in The Manager's name.  Once I found the right information for The Manager, the residency and age matched up with what T had on his profile, so I dug deeper.  I found a people finder that would also search email addresses.  When I did the search, I found out it would give you the full email except for 3-4 characters before the @ sign.  This search turned up an email that was identical to T's (assuming the 3-4 mystery characters were the same).  T's email address was very particular, so I find it highly unlikely that there just happens to be another person with the same name as The Manager that also has an email address eerily similar to T's.


In the next message I sent T, I asked him if he was somebody I already knew.  I waited anxiously for his response, and when it came in, he had completely ignored my question.  So, I called him out on ignoring my question and let him know that when he was ready to be honest, I would be waiting.  I never heard back from T.  I did hear from The Manager, though.  But not in the way I thought I would.  He would message me on Facebook to see how I was doing from time to time.  I've ignored every message he's sent so far.  I even received one from his cousin (Didn't T live with his cousin?) asking if I was the same person who worked at a grocery store with The Manager.  Apparently, he thought maybe he was sending messages to the wrong person and had his cousin confirm it for him.


So, thanks to T, I try to keep things equal.  If I know something about a guy, then they deserve to know the same about me and vice versa.  I'm also very good at finding information about people online.  I'm not proud of it, and I only look things up if a guy is kind of shady.  I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into my naivete.