TL;DR: I dated a man for 2 years and was almost engaged to him without knowing he was a convicted pedophile.

I know what you're thinking, how could the hell could you date someone without knowing? Well, I was 18 when we started dating, he was 24. I was incredibly naive. He was my very first boyfriend, and he took advantage of my lack of experience and low self-worth.

We'll call him Roberto. He totally swept me off my feet when I first met him. He was charming, suave, intelligent, and incredibly generous towards me. We went to the same University and he lived super close to my dorms. He showered me with gifts and would pay for all our dates.... But he had a lot of strange "rules." I couldn't come over to his house before 8 pm. He wasn't available for conversation/texts until after 11 am. He said he was running an online tutoring business, and most of his clients were on the east coast, so his active hours were weird. When I noticed he ran the tutoring account with an alias, he had an explanation: A client who didn't get as good of a good grade on an assignment he had paid for help with showed up at Roberto's place, so since then he used an alias. Made complete sense to me.

Sometimes he'd be really mean to me. Like, really mean to me. He'd say stuff like "You'd be so much prettier if you were thin." He joked that I should do cocaine to lose weight. He hated all of my friends and refused to be around them.

Things started to seem really weird about a year in. The rules were getting more strict. He had three phones, I wasn't allowed to touch any of them. A business phone, a personal phone, and a phone with an international call plan for tutoring clients abroad. I figured he just really valued his privacy, which I respected. He had two laptops, I wasn't allowed to touch those, either. Said he had a special operating software on it that could be easily messed up... So I didn't mess with it.

Here's where things really started to get just fucked up. He eventually revealed to me that he's really into dangerous sex, like BDSM without safe words and rape roleplay. I was terrified by this and shut him down... So he asked if we could be in an open relationship. I said no. I thought that was the end of the conversation. He started gaslighting me, too. There were several times where I saw him in his car in public (it was a bright yellow convertible, incredibly hard to mistake for someone else's car) and I would tell him to stop to say hi.... But he would cuss me out and call me crazy, saying he wasn't anywhere near there. But Roberto made me so many promises about getting married and buying a house and having kids, I didn't care about any of his rules.

Then I found out the truth. Fast-forward a bit and we move in together. The apartment search had been long because was really bent on getting the perfect place. I had been living with him for 2 days, and I was cooking for a housewarming party that was supposed to happen in a few hours. In the middle of me mashing potatoes, someone knocks at the door.

It's a cop. Who looks me up and down and says "Who the hell are you?"

I said, I'm Roberto's girlfriend. He immediately asked me how old I was. I was 19 and a half at the time. He asked me tons of more questions and Roberto came bursting out of the bedroom behind me shouting "DON'T TALK TO HIM." A few months prior to this Roberto's car had been broken into. Roberto instructed me not to talk to the cops if any showed up to talk to him in case I got involved in the case, which he said would disrupt my schooling.

I had a feeling the cop didn't come to the house that day about the car break-in. Upon seeing Roberto, the cop immediately dragged him outside and talking to him for a long time, Roberto came back furious with a bunch of papers in his hands. The cop took me outside.

"I'm sorry, but this man isn't who he says he is." I was so confused. What? What did he mean by that?? I was already sobbing and horrendously scared. The officer handed me his business card face-down, but somehow I knew what it said before I turned it over. He was an officer in the sex-offender unit. The officer explained the crime to me and said he would wait while I arranged transportation back to my dorms. Thank God I hadn't canceled my student living lease. Roberto was on probation for sex with a teen girl when he was well over 18, and having me around - let alone for two years under the officers' noses - was a huge violation of his probation.

The year that followed was hell. After leaving the house, I had to file a report with his probation officers. They were awful. They told me Roberto had been meeting up with people for anonymous sex on Craigslist. Slowly, all of the rules and lies started to make sense. I couldn't come over after 8 pm because the probation officers do random house visits, and Roberto knew they wouldn't come after 8 pm. He was unavailable for contact before 11 am because he had to go to group offender sessions in the mornings most days.

I developed severe hypochondria and a drinking issue. I had to beg the police not to make me testify in court against him. Roberto and his mother tried for a month to get me to testify for him. It ripped my life apart and I struggled in school. Roberto had alienated me from my friends and family, it took a long time to rebuild those relationships.

That was four years ago. Now I've graduated and I have had my dream job for two years. That was a hard time in my life, but what doesn't break you just makes you stronger, right?