Bad romance

When Mira Celper, right, saw her mom, Leigh Hendry, quickly fall in love with a man she only knew through phone calls, she became suspicious. Courtesy Mira Celper

Mira Celper's relationship with her mom grew strained when her mom started dating the mysterious David. As her mom fell deeper in love, Mira couldn’t shake the feeling that something about David was off.

Mira Celper’s mom rebounded quickly. Less than a month after leaving her stepdad, Celper’s mom was back to dating, this time on dating apps.

“It was just shocking. I thought to myself, like, it’s just so early,” Celper said. “But it was not something that I said to her.”

As a busy college student, Celper watched as her mom fell for a successful civil engineer she met on a dating app. But when he went to Turkey for a work project and became stranded there, Celper started to second-guess the whole relationship. Every week he had new excuse for why he couldn’t come home — and with each excuse, her mom seemed more deeply in love.

Celper couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off about the whole relationship.

But to her mom, Leigh Hendry, everything felt totally right. She had met her dream man, and she was willing to do anything to help him.

When a mother and daughter see the same relationship with wildly different eyes, it gets messy. This week, love comes at a cost.

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