I [34/M] have been dating a woman [33/F] for the past four months. Overall, things have been going pretty well. However, as I'm learning more about her, some pretty serious red flags are beginning to emerge. Many of these red flags have to do with her work, which I have reason to believe isn't entirely on the right side of the law.
These red flags are as follows:
— We met online, and the first time we saw each other IRL, she was wearing a long, bright red trench coat with brass buttons, a matching red Panama hat with a yellow hatband, and black gloves. It was the same outfit she wore in the pictures she sent me, and I thought she was making an effort to wear something eye-catching so I would be able to pick her out. Well, I was wrong. She wears this outfit all the time. She lounges around the house like this. She goes to the store like this. She wears this outfit in any type of weather and during any activity, up to and including sex. She even has an identical coat she can wear when she has to wash her primary one. There's clearly something mentally unhealthy about wearing such a garish getup every single day. Autism spectrum? OCD? Thirst for attention? All I know is, I waited too long to ask her about it and now it'd be super awkward to bring up.
— She works in “exporting” — that's all the detail I get when I ask. She has to travel a lot for work, but she'll never tell me flat out where she's going. Instead, she'll drop a couple of cryptic clues like “I'm changing my money to rupees” or “I'll have to pack my Yoruba dictionary.” I find it incredibly rude and dismissive. More than that, all this secrecy was what made me start to suspect that her job wasn't on the level.
— When we first started dating, she was very upfront about the fact that her jet-setting lifestyle was poorly suited for monogamy, so we've been dating on a non-exclusive basis. I'd never given polyamory a try before, but I consider myself pretty broad-minded and there's a first time for everything. The problem arose when I started to meet some of her other BFs. To be blunt, they all look incredibly sketchy. I'm talking eye patches, facial scars, jagged teeth, hooks for hands, prison tattoos, things like that. And I'm not allowed to know any of their real names, either. Every time I ask who such-and-such is, I get a ludicrously fake pun answer like a G-rated version of a Bart Simpson prank call: “Al Lergy”, “Oliver Town”, “Ron A. Way”, “Y.I. Otta”, are some of the more subtle ones. I'm not thrilled that she's hanging out with obvious criminals, but it really stings that she doesn't trust me enough to know about her life or respect me enough to come up with some more believable aliases.
— These past couple weeks, I've been putting together her tossed-off clues and figuring out where she's going. It feels like a betrayal of trust, but she's worrying me a lot and I don't feel like I have any other choice. Long story short, some of the places on her itinerary had famous buildings, landmarks and national phenomena go missing recently, including the CN Tower, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Angkor Wat temples.
Which brings me to…
— She's away again right now, and she told me before she left that there was an important package coming and she needed me to pick it up from her porch. Well, the package came today, and it's hard to say for sure because of the wrapping, but it looks a hell of a lot like Westminster Abbey. I snapped and wrote her an email trying to get the truth, but she gave me some lame excuse about how she's rafting down the Amazon right now and she'd get back to me ass soon as she was out of piranha-infested waters.
TL;DR: My GF dresses weirdly, keeps secretive hours and company, and may have just made me an accessory to the theft of an 800-year-old church.