Networking was one of the things I hoped to get here. There are men who network via HN. It has not worked for me.

I was homeless for 5.7 years. I remain dirt poor. My attempts to point out that my gender is a barrier to making strong professional connections is a root cause of my poverty have largely fallen on deaf ears for years and what minimal headway I have made is extremely recent.

One outcome related to that: I let some young punk talk to me for some weeks who was pretending to be my friend because he was basically the only person talking to me and I desperately need professional connections. Ultimately, he let me know he needed a shoulder to cry on because his marriage was falling apart.

I did the decent thing and was supportive for a time. Then he resumed sleeping with his wife, repeating things to her that I had told him in confidence and talking at me as if we were lovers, a thing I told him was absolutely a non starter.

The relationship made me uncomfortable from the start. There were a lot of weird issues with it that suddenly made sense after I learned he was married and hiding it from me.

I took a no harm, no foul position on it initially. The more I think about it, the more I feel I was used, deceived and set up. He had no plans to ever take me seriously. He withheld his age and marital status knowing he could not get close to me romantically if I did know those things.

All the uncomfortable red flag stuff got ignored by me because I have literally zero strong professional connections to anyone at all. I simply don't know what that looks like. Further, I am dirt poor. I am in very desperate need of connections and opportunities and cannot get that.

If I had plenty of professional connections, I would have never let this guy string me along and set me up to be his shoulder to cry on.