background check

If we could run a background check on every boyfriend my younger sister brings home, I would be happy.

To date, she has put herself and our family through a wide range of boyfriend horrors. She has dated men who have been drug dealers, gang members, cheaters, married, new fathers, std carriers, rapists and psych ward patients.

My sister is not a bad girl, but she is most definitely a magnet for the worst guys out there. Thankfully, she has narrowly escaped a whole host of disasters, with amazingly few scrapes, but we just never know when disaster might strike. Therefore, the desire to run a background check the next time some potential boyfriend comes along, BEFORE she gets too deeply involved, is very desirable!

Her latest adventure began during a recent hospital stay. She had shattered her ankle in a car accident the year before, and she was hospitalized for a series of tests and some invasive surgery. Even though, her ankle was essentially rebroken and reset, the nurses encouraged her to become mobile as soon as she could. It was during her travels through the hallways of the hospital that she met The Psycho - and one of the strongest reasons we've come across for wanting to be able to run background checks on some of these guys.

This fine fellow had been committed to the Psychiatric Unit after walking out in front of a car and subsequently being hit. Of course, he claimed it was all a mistake, that he couldn't remember what happened, and that he most certainly hadn't walked into traffic in an effort to end his life. And of course, my sister bought his story.

Fast forward to three months later: At this point, even my sister realized that this guy was not quite right. Unfortunately, at this point she was having trouble getting rid of him. Although he promised her the world, he had no friends, no contact with his family, would not give her a home telephone number or tell her where he lived and evaded the question when she asked him if he had a job. Meanwhile, he would make promises to pay off all her debt (he claimed to have limitless credit) and even offered to let her move in with him within days of meeting her. She started getting pretty freaked out when he told her the reason that he didn't have any friends and why his family wouldn't speak to him: on a whim, he suddenly moved to the US for two years without telling anyone. He still didn't understand what was wrong with that, and felt hard-done-by and played the role of the victim. When she told him she didn't want to talk to him anymore, he showed up at her door, which a two hour drive from the city, and he doesn't have a car.

When she finally dumped him once and for all. He freaked out and headed for California... again without telling anyone. Then he wrote to her from Texas. We don't know to this day what he was involved in. We do know that he was pretty scary - he claimed to have been abused in every way by his parents and yet refused any therapy, and thought he could solve all my sister's problems if she'd only let him try.

I've often joked with my sister about the need for a background check before she gets involved. The thing is, I'm not really joking - I'm serious and I wish there really was a way!