“I walked in and immediately stepped right into fresh human poo.”

"He was a very attractive guy, earning six figures in a professional job. He wore suits to work and on our dates. When I walked inside his house for the first time, it was a literal mess, with rubbish and debris littered all over the floor. My eyes were drawn to something on the floor near the bed... and it was a used tampon. Not my tampon. Not his tampon. How long had it been there? Who did it belong to? These are the questions. His house was gross, but that random tampon was the cherry on top for me."

"There was cat shit, vomit, and hair over every surface. Untrained, unneutered dogs were marking everything. There were partially decayed dead mice everywhere. He'd grown up with it and had given up a long time ago, since no one else was doing anything about it, and eight-plus free-roaming animals, plus more in enclosures, is a lot to try and battle back.

I only discovered all of that later. The first time I was there, I just asked if I could use the bathroom when I arrived to pick him up on the way to a show we were going to. He walked me inside like a man on his way to the electric chair. The ferret reek hit me like a brick wall, and I did a hard 180 and decided to hold it until we got where we were going. Really heartbreaking.

That was three years ago, and I have since extracted him and the cat that's his baby to my place, where they are both doing so much better."

"I went to his apartment for the first time, and he had an A4-size close-up photo of my face (no neck or shoulders, no body, just my face), framed and mounted on the wall right next to his five-year-old son's photo. I had gone over there that day to help him seal up some windows ahead of a pending storm. The photo freaked me out, but I held my composure, sealed the windows, gave him a peck on the cheek goodbye, and got out of there as fast as I could. I went home, waited a bit, and then sent him a 'this ain't gonna work, take that photo down' type of message."

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