My Boyfriend Proposed Right After Seeing My Luxury Apartment—He Had No Idea It Was a Test

Charismatic. Ambitious in a restless, surface-level kind of way. And as he kissed me outside under a busted neon sign that blinked like it couldn’t decide what mood it was in, I thought that maybe this could be something.

And it was. For a while. But here’s the thing about charm, it can start to sound like a script.

By our third month together, I noticed the patterns. We always went to his apartment. A cramped one-bedroom in a building that smelled faintly of incense and despair.

He called it “charming.” I called it “no hot water after 10.”

Ryan always paid for dinner but only if we ate somewhere cheap. He talked about “materialistic women” and “tired gold-diggers” like it was a rehearsed speech he knew well. I started realizing that he spent a lot of time talking about what he didn’t want in a partner and very little time asking me what I wanted.

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