Come close, my pretties, and let me tell you a scary and financially disastrous Halloween love story.

I rarely dated during the years Mr. A and I were divorced. Getting married again was not my first priority.  Being the best parent I could be was a lot more important. However, I did date a guy I met online for a brief period of time.

I'd met this really neat lady that was a relationship coach.   Michelle was also starting an online dating website.  It was beautiful, and had so many good articles and information on finding your true love; however, there were so many typos I couldn't help myself and volunteered to help her clean up the site.  She invited me to attend one of her In Real Life relationship classes, so I decided to see what it was all about.

That's where I met  Mr. Mague (pronounced Magoo).

At the relationship class, she encouraged everyone to sign up at her website.  Mr. Mague and I checked out each others' profiles and it seemed as if we had a lot in common.  We started communicating by email, and things moved along quickly.  Within three months Mr. Mague proposed marriage.  Our relationship was somewhat long distance; we hadn't really spent much time together but we'd both been married before, knew what it was all about, and figured why waste time?

Eventually, I recognized that Mr. Mague had a strong need to “rescue” women that were in a lower economic status than he.  He came from a middle-upper class family; but in reality, he wasn't doing much better off financially than the women he was dating.  In order to come to the rescue of a woman in need financially, she literally had to be on welfare.  He was a school teacher, working on an Indian reservation a few hundred miles from the big city.  Now let me tell you, in case you don't know; Indian reservations tend to be made up of poor people, and we all know how grossly underpaid teachers are.  Just imagine how much he was making living on an Indian reservation.  His weekend job was selling Amway.

He was reluctant to share his income with me, yet he was anxious to get married.  He kept reassuring me that everything would work out okay, don't worry about it.

Well, worrying is actually, unfortunately, a strong character trait of mine. I'm not one to flit through life with nary a concern for my financial situation. I needed to know that he was actually able to take us on financially.  As I said, he was very reluctant to share his income, and finally I gave him a list of my bills.  It was during the years when I was getting out of debt the first time.  I was liable to keep up with those payments, and I was buying my own mobile home – paying my step-grandparents monthly as I'd promised.  He was a little shocked to see how much money it would cost to support me and my boys, and finally confessed that his income was just a couple of hundred dollars more than I had coming in between Big A's supplement security income, our monthly welfare stipend, and food stamps!

Perhaps he assumed the father of my children was paying a large amount of child support that would continue to come our way once we were married.  This was during the years Mr. A fell behind on his child support payments, so that wasn't the case. I already knew that Big A's supplement security income would be affected by my fiance's income, and the food stamps and welfare would definitely come to a screeching halt. That would leave him with a lot of extra bills with no money to pay for it.  And it's not like he was planning to quit his teaching job and go for something else where he'd earn more money.  He loved working with his “kids”… so much so that he was full of “good” parenting advice on how I could raise my children – after all, it worked with “his” kids! Well, Mr. Mague, your “kids” go home after the day has ended. Try living in the real world, parenting your own children 24/7 for years on end.  Makes a world of difference. But I digress.

Mr. Mague was still not interested in facing the facts, “Don't worry, it'll be okay, we'll make it somehow.”

Initially he hid his intense desire to become wealthy selling Amway.  He drove two hours into town every Friday after school was over for the week, and stayed with his parents for the weekend. He led me to believe it was simply due to the boredom factor of living on the rez.  Some have casinos but he wasn't into that kind of gambling.  Eventually he revealed that he was attending Amway rallies designed to work the salespeople into a frenzy about getting rich by selling the products.  Finally Mr. Mague shared his dream of how I was going to be the perfect Amway wife.  I couldn't help myself, and  immediately popped that bubble, letting him know exactly how opposed I was to becoming an Amway robot saleswoman.

As I learned more about him, I became more alarmed. I found he lived in a one bedroom apartment on the rez, cheap rent that he could barely afford, and finally he confessed that he'd had to file bankruptcy just a few years earlier so his credit was shot. All these things are just fine, but not when you're telling a woman you're about to marry that you have plenty of money.

Eventually we came to our senses, and broke off the relationship.

Mr. A was very relieved, to say the least.

Yours Truly,