First of Many Lies AKA Trillium Benefits

 

There are so many lies woven into Asshole's story that to this day, I still don't know what is fact or fiction. At first, they went almost unnoticed. A shimmer of doubt here or there that I wasn't able to confirm or deny.

I am one of those people that believes that the past belongs in the past, so I didn't care much about what happened before. Just that going forward that things were honest and open. Asshole liked telling me about his job, and how important he was at work, and how much money he made, all trying to impress me. He had no understanding that money doesn't impress me. I grew up without money, and I have seen people lose everything in the blink of an eye, so there are more important things in my life.

Early on in our relationship, sometime in April, as it was still tax season (and I do income taxes for a living) Asshole had been complaining about being on the phone that day with CRA. I was curious what he could be having issues with. As someone who deals with CRA daily, I find it causes some people extreme stress, so I was trying to see if I could help explain things, ease his stress.

Asshole let me know that he was having issues with his Trillium benefits. Umm, what? Red flag, red flag, red flag my brain screamed. To be fair, I don't care if someone receives Trillium benefits. What I do care, is that someone who tells me he has income from two different jobs of over $100,000 for each job and is receiving Trillium benefits is lying. Either about the job, or the Trillium benefits. To be honest, people making what Asshole claimed to make don't even know what Trillium benefits are. That's something only low income people qualify for.

When I questioned how he was receiving Trillium benefits with an income over $40,000 (approximately the threshold at the time for Trillium) he became quite hostile. I know now, that he realized his mistake and instead of owning up to the lie, he doubled down. Asshole let me know that I didn't know what I was talking about, as I had never seen his tax return and information slips. Very true, but there was still no way, with the information that I had, that he could be telling me the truth.

It was my job to know this type of information. Literally my job, and I am pretty darn good at my job. That was the night that I learned that Asshole didn't like to be challenged. He became quite hostile after that, when he felt that I was calling him a liar. I mean, he was, but apparently I wasn't ready to trust my instincts yet.

As time went on, I would learn that Asshole had no concept of money, what things cost, how investments work, how RRSP's work. It was because he had none of these things, so when he talked about them, he got very confused and mixed up. What's funny is that it was the lying that was the problem, not that he didn't have these things. I didn't care about money. 

I always wonder if I had trusted my instincts that night when we talked about your Trillium benefits what would have happened. Maybe I could have ended things that night without him becoming the way that he did.