18/10/2025
The Gentleman’s Mask
He is the kind of man everyone likes.
The one who remembers birthdays, sends polite follow-up texts, offers to carry the heavy things.
His charm is clean and practiced, like a pressed shirt and a rehearsed smile.
We can all mistake that polish for goodness.
He speaks about respect. About loyalty. About how he could never understand men who hurt women.
He calls himself a protector.
And maybe he believes it, because men like him often confuse image with integrity.
He is the man with shelves and playlists filled with titles like The Game and How to Dominate and Win Others.
He underlines passages about psychology and persuasion, quoting them as jokes that were never really jokes.
To him, every woman is a study. Every reaction, a small proof of power.
He does not call it control. He calls it connection.
When he meets you, you are light. Warm, open, disarming.
He tells you that you are different, that you are the one, that you are the first woman he has ever truly loved.
That is how every story like this begins.
You believe him, because believing is what kind souls do.
But slowly, you begin to notice how his kindness is currency.
It buys him trust, excuses, and applause.
He says he hates drama, yet somehow there is always some.
Little storms he creates through actions he knows will trigger you, then denies.
He smiles and says you are too sensitive, that he is innocent.
But the game was never innocent. It was designed to make you question yourself.
He tells you that you are jealous, insecure, paranoid, even crazy.
Meanwhile, he keeps trophies of women past, exes in his messages, memory boxes of lingerie, old conversations, echoes of conquest.
He reminds you that you are wrong again, that it is normal, that you need medication or therapy.
He begins whispering about you to others, quietly poisoning your name to prepare his exit, all while saying he loves you.
And you want to believe him.
But the body always knows what the mind cannot admit.
Love cannot survive where there is constant proof of disrespect.
To the world, he is charming. A man who helps his friends, smiles in photos, says all the right things.
But behind closed doors, he feeds on attention the way some people need air.
It is not love he wants. It is reflection, faces that mirror back his importance.
The cruelest part is that he will never see himself as cruel.
In his story, he is the misunderstood one. The man who only wanted peace.
The woman is the storm, the complication, the cautionary tale he will write about in his journal of triumphs.
He will say his exes were crazy, addicts, abusive.
And you will believe him.
But remember this. You were never the storm.
You were the weather that revealed him, the sunlight that exposed the cracks in his calm facade.
And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
That is when you become free.
That is when the mask slips.
Not with an explosion, but with the quiet realization that love should never feel like strategy.
That is when the game ends.
