The summer after Dre and I broke up I decided to make a Tinder. Everyone was telling me how poppin’ it was, so I decided to shoot my shot. As soon as I created a Tinder I started meeting nothing but losers. Just when I was about to delete the app, I ended up matching with Sebastian Conner… He was a 22 year old EMT supervisor who was from Berkeley.

If you are not familiar with Tinder, it matches you with people based on the distance you are to each other. I was still living in my apt on 11th street in San Jose and Sebastian lived on 7th Street… it was super convenient. We ended up chilling a few times and then he asked me to be his girlfriend. I told him no, because I had only known him for three weeks. Sebastian asked and asked and asked and I continued to say NO. I wasn’t going to be with someone I didn’t know well enough like I did with Dre… I had to start learning from my mistakes.

Sebastian and I went on dates and to different parties all throughout the summer. He was a well known DJ for raves in the Bay Area, so I would frequently go to those with him, even though they weren’t my thing. Once September came we finally made it official. I was sad though, because Sebastian was moving to Berkeley to go back to school. My once convenient boyfriend was now an hour and a half away… it sucked.

From September to December Sebastian and I had a rocky relationship. We saw each other when we could, but I was unhappy, because we didn’t communicate as often. Another thing was that Sebastian would tell me things and they just didn’t add up. I didn’t trust him at all.

The biggest red flag was when some random girl hit me up on Instagram. We exchanged numbers and she claimed to be Sebastian’s ex girlfriend. Once the girl and I started talking she sent me all these text messages and receipts proving that she had been to his house the night before and that they had slept together. She even sent me a screen shot  of an Uber receipt to his house.  She said that she didn’t know he had a girlfriend until she checked his Instagram the next day. It was crazy. He told me that she was his “crazy ex girlfriend” who was jealous that he had moved on. He told me that she’s known for generating fake text messages and would go as far as to Uber to his house without him knowing just to sabotage our relationship. He was such a manipulator that he talked his way out of that situation and many other things that seemed sus.

Around the same time my best friend Quincy had warned me about Sebastian, because they had mutual friends who vouched that he was a cheater and a compulsive liar. Of course Sebastian claimed that these women were just lying , because they were upset that he curved them. I was so busy that I didn’t have the energy to stress about what the truth was, so like a dumbass I ignored all the warnings I received.

This relationship really took me out of character. I was spending so much time going back and forth from San Jose to Berkeley that I barely graduated from college. I neglected one of my most important classes and barely passed. My GPA all throughout college was a 3.5, but that semester it dropped to a 2.5.

I was taking 12 units, I had three jobs, I was in a sorority and I had a boyfriend… this was the hardest four months of my life.

By the grace of God I graduated that December. After I graduated I decided to move back in with my parents, because I knew that I needed to start saving my money to pay back my student loans. When I moved back to San Leandro, Sebastian and I were much closer distance wise. I was happy at first, but I didn’t expect what would happen in 2016. 2016 was by far the worst year of my life…