Unspoken Rules

** Editors' Note: J.Ho sent us this a few days ago. Hopefully we'll get another update about GI next week. Happy dating.

I've always had these sort of unspoken rules about dating, unspoken because they were so obvious that they didn't require articulation. There were the Don't Dates. married men, the exes of my friends, Evangelical Christians, pedophiles, incarcerated men. Men with kids and divorced men made the list too. Smokers, since I quit, have been added.

But that was college. It was easy enough to not break these rules, though were an abundance of bad seeds that probably should have made the list (alcoholics, limpdicks, men that were jealous of my career, stupid men, newspaper cartoonists).

Post-college opened me up to a whole world of Don't Dates. I met him -- I'll call him Good Idea -- while working one day. He was talking about his divorce and his kid. Kid. Divorce, which lead to the smoking. A triple-whammy. Nothin' but red flags. Somehow, he made the cut though.

He was interesting, and sexy, and crazy. The perfect rebound from the square who broke my heart not too long ago. He's a spectacular photographer and had just returned from being embedded with U.S. troops in the Middle East. I was intrigued. It was rough on him. During his second tour, his wife left him. His wife left HIM. He can't be too bad, right?

And anyways, two of my good friends have dated almost-divorced men. Because legal documents are just a formality, a complication. Because almost-divorced, in this litigious world of ours, is the new single.

The date with Good Idea began normal enough. Mediocre tapas at an overpriced Spanish place. Drinks. Then we headed to a concert he was photographing and he introduces me to a Pretty Thin Girl. PTG and GI had a tryst a few weeks ago at GI's house. They basically fucked, for a week straight, while her boyfriend was out of town. He buys PTG and her friend drinks, so they linger. Red flag: he has trysts with women who are attached, and now he's buying her drinks. I bounce and go and talk to the opening act.

PTG and her friend follow us after the concert gets out. I walk fast until they finally head their own way, to meet up with PTG' boyfriend at another bar. GI and I sit down on a patio, meet up with a friend of mine, and chat. I learn that he lives with his wife. His WIFE, because they're not divorced. Red flag. No, papers haven't even been filed. But he's sleeping in the guest bedroom, he says, even though they've been split for a year. Something to do with the mortgage. When she left him, she apparently didn't leave, physically. PTG reappears and GI informs me that her boyfriend wants to kill him. Great, wonderful, so there's been a hit put out on my date?

We get a hotel, because my house is being fogged for pests and its either that or the couch at my friends un-air-conditioned apartments. He's also got work early the next morning and his house is a long drive. It's nice, it's fine. I wake up the next morning, and it's more of the same. Then, there is the jolting sound of the hotel phone. It's the loudest thing I've heard all morning, and I jump a little. It's his wife. Fuck. FUCK. She wants to know what he's been doing. He rushes over and closes the curtains, because she could be watching us he says. Our voices drop to a low whisper. She could be right outside the door. This is more mortifying then when my mom walked in on me post-coital when I was 18.

"She's fucking crazy," he tells me. How does she know he's here?

"I paid with cash," he says. "I don't know how she found me."

What?

"She has access to my online bank account. Maybe she saw that I put down a deposit here."

I throw my hands up, "I'm not doing this. This is too much. Nope, I'm walking home. No more." I'm a good hour away from home, through Uptown, where I could get mugged. The sense of resolve I exhibited, it's a little intoxicating.

We check the hallways and I scurry out and march indignantly up the street, in yesterday's clothes, with yesterday's smells. He picks me up 10 minutes later.
He later tells me the phone call from the wife was no big deal. Evidently, she had lost her phone. She knew he was there because she saw his car in the parking lot of the hotel. She had spent the night there with the man she left him for. Yes, totally normal, the separated-but-not-divorced-but-still-co-habitating couple had left their infant son with GI's mother to go out and hook up with other people in the city for the night.

This guy is nothin' but trouble. I'm seeing him again this week.