What would you do if your boyfriend of more than a month shows up to the first date looking like a totally different person?
Derayo*(28) recalls how she found out that her boyfriend didn’t look like who he claimed to be, how she handled it and why video calls are mandatory for her now.
This is Derayo*’s story as told to Betty:
In late 2020, I randomly met Femi* on a large Facebook group chat I joined out of boredom. We talked about the books we liked and realised we had similar tastes. A few days after, we took the chat to our private messages. A week later, we were talking almost every single day for hours on end. If we weren’t on the phone, we were texting each other.
After two months of nonstop communication, Femi asked me to be his girlfriend, and I said yes. We started making plans to meet in person, but he lived in a different city, and we had to work around our job schedules. We finally made plans to meet in January 2021.
Now, Femi’s Facebook profile picture wasn’t outlandish. It showed a handsome young man with a crisp, low-cut hairstyle. In the photo, he wore an Ankara outfit and looked to be at a wedding. His other photos, though not many, showed the same person. Of course, I assumed that it was Femi in those photos.
We didn’t do video calls because he said his phone was bad. I believed him. I didn’t mind because we talked often regardless of the fact, and I started to feel like we had something special.
Fast-forward to our first in-person date, we planned to meet at a restaurant in my city. I got dressed up and pulled out all the stops for my “boyfriend.”
I arrived first and sat down, waiting for him to show up. After fifteen minutes of waiting, I got a text from Femi. It said, “I’m scared to show my face, but you look great.” So I started looking around but didn’t see “my” Femi.
I texted back “Stop forming and join me, jor,” thinking that he was joking. That’s how this individual, who looked nothing like the man I was talking to on Facebook, showed up at the table.
I was confused, so I told him that I was expecting someone already. The man said he was, in fact, the Femi I’d been talking to online. I didn’t want to believe it. This “Femi” also had a freshly cut hairstyle, but he was several times lighter than the man in his profile picture, and his face was punctuated with massive cystic acne bumps.
I yelled “Who are you??” so loudly that one of the waiters came to ask if we were alright.
Femi started trying to explain how he was scared to approach me because he wasn’t confident about how he looked. He was very insecure about his acne issues. I didn’t mind that his skin wasn’t as smooth as glass, but I couldn’t accept that he had been lying to me about what he looked like the entire time we talked. He begged me to stay for dinner just to talk things out, but I couldn’t stand it. I just kept thinking to myself about what other things he may have been lying about. God forbid he had a secret family or worse, a kidnapper.
I cut my losses, left the dinner and sent a break-up text on my way home. The next day, I saw that he had left the group chat and blocked me everywhere. I just thank God I hadn’t told many people I was in a relationship before meeting him in person. My friend group laughed at me when I told them what happened. Looking back, it is a bit funny, but at the time I was gutted. I really liked him, at least who I thought he was.
Since then, if I start talking to someone, video calls are mandatory, please. I don’t want to do “what I ordered versus what I got” again.
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