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Strange Love: My Affair with a Guy in a Cult
And how a dog deprogrammed me.
My Dad told me not to use the word “cult.” As Jews we had our fair share of being marginalized (see: all of history), and we weren’t going to marginalize anyone else. But then I matched with Jeremy on Bumble.
Jeremy spent years traveling to another country as part of a religious group named after This One Guy. When Jeremy talked about the group he didn’t talk about a text, or religious tenets, but just what This One Guy said. So while I hate to break Dad’s rule, “cultish” is the only way to describe Jeremy, and by extension our bonkers little affair.
Jeremy was so good-looking it was as if he were built in a lab. I texted photos of him to my friends, asking Can you believe I’m sleeping with this guy? And because these are good friends, the kind of friends who would show up with a tarp and shovel if you told them you murdered someone, they just silently added fire emojis to his photos and stood by in case I later fell apart.
Despite Jeremy’s hotness (or maybe because of it) I had a weird feeling from the start. During our first phone conversation, I told him I was in pain from a cosmetic procedure. He laughed a weird, slow laugh, like The Count from Sesame Street. “It’s funny that I’m in pain?” I asked. “No,” he said, his voice somehow now a…
