The Hotdog Water Lady and the Instagram Story: A Dating Nightmare
An epic and humbling tale of how being careful can STILL blow up in your face
Whether you’ve followed me for a while or have recently joined, you know how adamant I am about helping people ensure they know the privacy settings of the apps they’re using — and how committed I am to using dating apps safely (hoping to add more public classes soon!).
The road to hell, however, is still paved with good intentions. The road to anger and annoyance too.
This is a story about how being extra cautious and private did me a disservice. It’s a story about a time I played by own rules and wound up getting played in return.
Where do I begin? Well, the year was 2021 — a difficult one for me. I buried my father in May and began the difficult process of dragging the guy who assaulted me a few weeks after the funeral to court that summer.
It didn’t help that I had a noxious ex stalking my social media accounts. It felt violating, and as open and honest as I try to be with my readers, there were aspects of my life I took pains to obscure.
And one such aspect was found in my Instagam DM requests.
I have two Instagram accounts — a public one, and a private one. It can be a headache, but I recommend it to people whose professional lives are similar to mine. I like sharing my life and updates about my son with a small circle. And I like having a public account that anyone can follow to check out my work and hobbies and such.
One day in the cruel summer of 2021, I was digging around my public DM requests for something. And there, I saw an account whose userpic I vaguely recognized. I realized that I’d seen this person around Twitter. We ended up talking.
Long story short, our conversations turned personal. I know what you’re already thinking, “She opened up to a reply guy, what a fool. “ WHATEVER, MY DAD HAD JUST DIED, AND I SORT OF KNEW THE GUY FROM BEFORE.
After months of flirting, he flew to see me. It was really nice! He had a job I found interesting. He was cute and funny. He listened to the things I said about Russia and made note of them — they were useful in his line of work, and I so do love being useful (sometimes, to my own detriment). Other dudes and women in my life didn’t make me feel that way.
Eventually, he started making plans to relocate so he could be closer to me. His work allowed him to do that. I can’t say I was all in, I had a nagging feeling that he wasn’t quit right, as my friends can attest, but I saw the potential. I even helped him look at houses, which is a HUGE slog, but hey, we were vibing, and I was curious as to where it may lead. We ended up spending Christmas together, with my brother joining.
Here’s the important part: This entire time I was not letting on that I was dating someone and considering getting serious. I didn’t want weirdos poring over the details. Anything remotely related to That Guy went on my locked down private Instagram, if it did so at all.
Sounds smart, right? What a boss bitch, right? Lol, guess what happened next…
After Christmas, we drove down to pack up some of his stuff, and took his dog. The dog is adorable. I snapped a picture of me holding the noble beast, and I put it on a story on my public Instagram account. We’d been seeing each other since summer, and how could I deny my public account followers the unbearable cuteness of his animal?
Just a few hours later, I realized I had a bunch of missed calls and over a dozen of unhinged messages from a woman in Maine, his home state. After glancing at her pictures, the most charitable way to describe her would be as someone who looks like she smells of hotdog water.
I don’t mean in the sense that she looked particularly ugly, or poor, or anything cruel like that — no, she seemed completely unhinged, like a person you meet at a carnival or a seaside resort who wanders around mumbling to themselves amid the revelry.
She had pictures of herself with the guy I was dating. Taken some years before he and I had met, but still.
In her messages she was — of course — telling me that he was her boyfriend and demanding he get in touch with her. Among other things.
That Guy, which is what he deserves to be referred to by all who know him and don’t know him, immediately told me that she was 100% an ex, that she was unwell, and that she was threatening suicide. He also told me that she had wanted to kill his dog — the very same dog whose photo I’d taken — and while I didn’t know what to believe, based on he messages and overall vibe, I felt like he was probably telling the truth about that particular detail.
He sat in the bathroom talking to her for a while. He brought the dog in there so she could talk to the dog and feel better (a bit odd, considering the threats to the dog, but he did say she was so very sorry!). He emerged and told me that he was also really sorry, and that this would never happen again, she had promised him.
I was mad and unsettled. But I also had a weirdo ex who watched my social media like a hawk. I told him I would work to trust him and agreed to put the episode behind us.
LOL.
LMAO.
The year 2022 began. I was getting ready for the Russian invasion of Ukraine — I knew it was coming, even though few people believed me. That Guy, meanwhile, had to travel abroad for a few months. It seemed like a good thing. The dog episode had upset me. I felt like we needed, at best, a reset.
A few weeks before he came home, which was also a few weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion began, the woman he said was his “ex” began contacting me on Twitter.
This time, there were threats. And many crazy ramblings and accusations, but what stuck out at me were the threats. She had set up a new profile, which made it obvious that she was in town, just a few miles from me — obviously, she wanted me to check it out. And she had his dog in her possession. The very same dog that she’d allegedly threatened to kill. The dog he claimed to have dropped off with a friend before he went abroad.
Now, remember how he’d been trying to buy a house? He closed on one just days before he flew out. I had a hunch that she was living at that house now, the same house he had bought “to be closer to me” (ahahahaha).
Here we must step back and collectively admire the sheer audacity of That Guy. He told me, “Oh no no no, she’s not living there. I have no idea why she’s in town! I’d given her the dog as a way to help her process that I’d moved on,” or something to that effect.
At this point, I knew it was over. This man had not been honest with me. I began seeing other people. Life’s short, too short to waste on liars. But, I am a very curious person. At this point, I wanted to see just how much I’d been lied to and just how far he would take the lie.
So I went out to check on his house. He told me to do it. He said he hoped it hadn’t been broken into (hahahahaha). It didn’t seem like anyone was living there, though I did not notice some recently deposited trash. I scanned the street for Maine plates and otherwise played detective. It honestly was a nice distraction as I waited for the Russian attack and made plans with my relatives in Ukraine on what to stock up on.
I told him that the house seemed fine and that the only way we could be together was if h agreed to cease contact with his so-called “ex.” I knew he wasn’t going to honor any of that. But in my own little way, I was beginning to have fun with this bizarre situation.
The Russians launched the full-scale invasion. It was devastating. While it was going on, my eldest aunt became seriously ill. We didn’t know it at the time, but in addition to her host of ailments, she was already suffering from the cancer that would kill her in the summer of 2023.
I raised some money for my aunt, who desperately needed painkillers and IVs and better pillows and many other things, while keeping an eye on the Twitter account that belonged to the “ex.” She made fun of my efforts. Cool person, right? I told her everything I thought about her and blocked her.
A few days later, That Guy came home from abroad. He tried to hide it from me, except I no longer trusted anything he said. I wanted to see him sweat a little, even if from a distance. He was messaging me on East Coast time, somehow blissfully unaware that I would notice a detail like that.
I called him out on his bullshit. He knew he was done, but he was too much of a coward to even reply properly. A few days later, I called him out again for going silent. I then received an amazing message, in which he criticized my “requirement” when it came to no longer seeing his “ex” (who was never really an ex, as we all know by now) as well as a curious statement about how I may “hate him,” but he couldn’t just cut her out of his life like that.
I really wish I had told him, straight up, that he was not worthy of my hate. I had bigger fish to fry. But I did call him a coward, which felt good. Life went on. The war went on.
It did bug me — and it still does bug me — that he’d used my insight into Russia and Russians in his own work. But maybe a tiny bit of good came from that in the end, who knows. Certainly his own insight into Russia had greatly helped me, even if it bugs me to admit it.
As far as I know, the “ex” lives in the house he bought “to be closer to me,” and I hear the cute dog remains unharmed. Let us pray that it stays that way.
Now, why did I just tell you this story? Sure, it’s morbidly entertaining, as most dating nightmares are, but there is also a helpful detail:
Recall that I had been vey quiet about our relationship. Now recall that within hours of me posting a *public* photo of his dog, his “ex” was in touch. She was monitoring the accounts of every woman he followed on Instagram.
Do you see the contradiction here? If I’d been a little bit less private, I would have been tipped off sooner.
Here’s the thing — sometimes, you may do something that seems completely right, and sensible, but it won’t even matter. Because crazy people are going to crazy. And cowards are going to coward.
As I like to tell my Safer Dating Now clients, there’s simply no “perfect” way to suss someone out. There are no ideal paths to fulfillment, let alone to love. Anyone can get played, even the neighborhood OSINT lady 😉
I don’t look back on this episode with bitterness, but I do think it makes for a good story. It certainly taught me some things. And yes, it can be litigated and re-litigated, and plenty of people will tell me that I should have cut it off the minute I’d gotten all of those calls from Hotdog Water Lady, but I ended up having too much fun, in the end, to regret my decision to see the farce play out.
I do wish That Guy and Hotdog Water Lady well. I think they deserve each other, don’t you? But most of all, I feel for that cute dog. May it live out its days in harmony and peace, well fed and un-murdered.