Hemal Patel*

Now this guy was my soulmate. We interacted on shaadi, and within a couple of days had exchanged close to 600 text messages. Both of us were going bankrupt, and he couriered me his spare BlackBerry so that we could use BBM and save ourselves some cash. We were on the phone as much as we could possible be, and if not that, then we were IMing each other constantly.

He was a divorcee, 37 years of age, and your quintessential Mumbaiite. We had so much to talk about that we never ran out of topics of conversation. I loved hearing him talk and it seemed like that was the case with him too. We had made plans for a few months all in advance, that's how much we were in to each other without having met.

Now, to understand what happened, I'll have to give you a bit of background. I am a victim of child molestation, which had long-term repercussions on my psyche. I don't know if that was a reason, but I was also raped by one such guy that I had met on this portal. (I'll share that story in another blog post.)

Coming back to HP, I had mentioned my child molestation incident to him, and he was genuinely sorry for me, or so it felt. We continued talking and making plans to meet in Bombay and then going to Goa together, however, I also wanted to share my rape incident with him because I wanted no secrets between us.

So one fine day, I gathered my courage and told him that I had something else to share, but would do so after we'd returned from Goa, which is when he'd share his divorce details. He was mighty curious and kept insisting that I share whatever I had to. I told him that it was related to my childhood incident. And he asked me if I'd gotten pregnant at the time.Ultimately, I had no choice but to tell him the whole sordid story. He seemed taken aback and asked me how I could have let that happen. I told him I was in a standalone house with no one around, and I was so petrified and choked with fear that my brain had shut down. He refused to believe me, and simply stopped communicating.

To this day, I wonder if I did the right thing by coming clean and if I should have just let bygones be bygones and not mentioned it at all. I tried multiple times to explain to him that I wasn't guilty of anything apart from naivete, but he never believed me.

I hope that someday he gets to read this post and realize what an effort it took on my part to take a risk in sharing my story with him, and how much grief it caused me later. I don't think I have ever found a guy, who seemed so much to be my soulmate.

*Names have been changed not to protect their privacy but only to protect myself from unwanted lawsuits.