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Anonymous Italian text reflecting on dignity, repair, and the “throwaway” culture. |
This passage is not really about poverty.
For me, it is about relational values. It is commitment, repair, endurance, and responsibility. It is about staying when things are hard. About recognising the value of what — and who — is in front of you, instead of walking away when it becomes inconvenient.
When I place it alongside my own experience of relationships — the withdrawal, the disposability, the emotional abandonment — the parallel is confronting.
Once, we repaired things.
Now, we replace them.
And I have been expected to absorb the cost.
That is the emotional truth I am sitting with.
I grew up believing relationships were repaired, not discarded.
That belief has cost me more than I ever expected.
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As I write about my last experience, I will also weave in other dating experiences retrospectively in each post, and align it with what was unfolding in parallel during that time.
I despise online dating. As a woman, I find it risky and unsafe. It feels superficial, isolating, and strangely pretentious — a marketplace that strips people of context and reduces connection to curated fragments.
The world has changed, and that change scares me. It not only scares me in how people meet and date, but in the values that now seem to underpin those interactions.
I grew up believing you met someone in person — at social gatherings, through introductions by friends, through shared interests and real interpersonal interaction. There was a sense of grounding and accountability in that. You were seen in three dimensions, not reduced to a profile.
I did not want to go anywhere near online dating apps. But if you choose not to participate, you quickly discover how few options remain.
Despite the overwhelming number of people on those apps, I found myself searching for a needle in a haystack. Or should I say, the unique hay among the stack of needles.
And for a moment, I thought I had found one.
His name was Paul.
His profile looked normal. He sounded normal. He came across as a decent, down-to-earth man — not polished or performative.
In the week before we met, we spoke on the phone most nights.
The conversations were genuinely good. They weren’t superficial or rushed. They had substance.
During one of those early phone conversations, before we had met in person, he spoke of learning more about his father when he returned to Italy, to the place where his father had grown up. That stayed with me because it touched something personal.
My father grew up in a remote village in the mountains of Arcadia, in the Peloponnese. He was raised in similar historical circumstances, shaped by the same kinds of hardship and endurance our ancestors lived through. There is something grounding about walking the land your parents came from — about understanding where they were formed, and what they carried forward.
There was another parallel I didn’t name at the time. We had both lost our fathers. Paul lost his dad to dementia. I lost mine to suicide. Different endings, but a shared absence. A shared understanding of grief that doesn’t announce itself, but lives quietly beneath the surface.
During the time of meeting Paul, I still had to speak to a few other men on the phone. Some were unsettling. Some were simply strange. None progressed to a first date. The only one who stood out — the only one who, to me, felt safe, grounded, and genuinely human — was Paul.
Not only were our phone conversations thoughtful and easy, but that first date was unexpectedly perfect. Just a cup of tea — a guy of Italian descent who doesn’t drink coffee, which I found intriguing — and a walk through a nearby park. No performance. No pressure. Just conversation. Simple. Memorable.
For the first time in a long time, I felt like I might finally be onto something good.
The man I encountered before Paul represented the risk women fear most about online dating. I’ve always trusted my instincts, but I was still naïve enough to say yes politely, even when something felt off. In situations like that, I would always note the nearest exit, just in case.
In January 2016, I went on a date I already felt uneasy about from the phone conversation alone. He was full of himself, but not in a harmless way — there was something unsettling and performative about it. I looked up the restaurant beforehand and saw how outrageously expensive it was. That should have been my cue to cancel.
I didn’t.
He arrived with flowers, which in hindsight felt less like a gesture and more like a signal. Early in the evening, near the bar where it was loud, he made a comment I initially thought I’d misheard: that he had seen me from a distance and decided I was attractive enough to approach — otherwise, he would have walked away. At the time, I told myself I must have misunderstood. If I hadn’t, I would have walked out then and there.
I got through the dinner. He made a number of insulting comments, the kind that are delivered casually but land sharply. At one point, he flashed a physical wad of cash — another red flag — paid the bill, and I left as quickly as I could.
I remember thinking afterward that something in me had to change. Politeness had kept me in situations I should never have tolerated. My instincts had been right. I just hadn’t listened to them soon enough.
Several months later, in September 2016, I was recovering from pneumonia and staying at my mother’s due to the seriousness of my condition. While resting, I happened to see a television news segment previewed that evening. The main story featured a man whose face I instantly recognised — the same man I had gone on a date with months earlier at an expensive restaurant.
For a moment, I couldn’t place him. Then it came back. I started coughing so hard I could barely breathe.
If I hadn’t been sick, I would have been at work and none the wiser. What followed wasn’t normal. He was exposed as a fraudster who had swindled money from prominent people and others. His former fiancée spoke anonymously, warning others to stay away. He later went to jail.
That was my history immediately before meeting Paul the following month.
By that point in my life, I wasn’t losing hope. I had already lost it. Years of narcissism. Years of disrespect. Years where dignity felt optional rather than fundamental. I had spent my life hoping to meet one decent man and build a family of my own. Family meant everything to me.
Like Paul, I was afraid of ending up alone. But for me, the fear went deeper. I couldn’t take any more of this reality — a culture where risk to women is normalised, where harm is trivialised, where exhaustion is expected.
Meeting Paul felt like relief, like proof that good men still exist. For me, it felt like my last hope — and for the first time in a long time, I could finally breathe.
To be continued…
