Dearest Rachel –
Lynda Barry, underground cartoonist and one of Matt Groening’s mentors and inspirations, once described love as “an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.” Considering your and my distaste for tobacco in the first place (although you might remember my claim that cigar smoke, in small doses, is redolent of childhood trips to Wrigley Field with my grandfather, so it doesn’t hold completely awful associations, unless you count how bad the Cubs were in those days), that’s a pretty powerful and damning metaphor. We, as humans, know it’s harmful, we know it’s distasteful, and yet our species continues to engage in and with it, only to get the results everyone expected but ourselves, for some reason.
So it is with my online life, it would seem. I’ve set aside the dating apps for the most part over the past year, but they’re pretty insistent all the same, sending me emails and notifications on a regular basis as people check out my profile and send it the occasional ‘like.’ It’s in their interest to maintain mine, after all. My general rule is to let any ‘like’ marinate for a day or two, and then check it out; almost invariably, the alleged individual who sent me the ‘like’ has been bounced from the site – usually for violating the terms of service in one way or another – at which point I can dispose of the email as having been ‘seen to.’
But every so often, one or another actually stays up, leading me to believe (for a moment or two) that she might actually be real. It doesn’t necessarily mean that she is, or that she’s right for me (or anyone, for that matter) – “Dara”, believe it or not, is still out there on the website, so maybe she was the real deal, if a little too much into the ‘high life’ for my tastes. Although it’s weird, since she suggested that I delete my profile, as she was going to take hers down upon finding me. Maybe it’s just another part of the whole ‘pig-butchering’ process, and ‘she’s’ better at staying slightly under the radar for the next pig.
This week, after getting a ‘like’ before Thanksgiving, I decided to let it sit there over the holiday before responding. There were other things on my plate to deal with, and it had some of the usual red flags associated with catfish; particularly, a request to contact her via e-mail rather than to chat on the dating app itself. While not an explicit violation of the site’s terms of service, they don’t recommend following up contact with a person who gives out their phone number or e-mail address directly (and the catfishers generally misspell their email address, using the word ‘at’ instead of the ‘@’ sign so as to not get the site’s attention in that regard).
However, after the holiday took place, I checked the contact out, and lo and behold, it hadn’t been removed. So I decided to take a chance and send ‘her’ an email, just to see what might come of it. I wasn’t expecting much, and after a couple of days of silence, I figured she’d given up on me as a ‘mark’ and moved on, without noticing that I’d responded. But on Saturday morning, she sent me a reply, telling her story; supposedly, she was born and raised in Atlanta, the only child of a British-born mother, and now lived and worked in the city (a “30 minute drive” from where I lived, she claimed) as an interior designer. Nothing too good to be true, offhand, unless you count the fact that her profile listed her as being just 40 years old (although her profile picture showed every one of those years and then some).
So I decided to pursue the conversation, especially since there were a few things I wanted to clarify about her situation. For one, I inquired about which neighborhood in the city she called home; it would be one thing if she lived in Portage Park (heck, I could even recommend a church to attend – which I would make a point to visit when not assigned to the booth) as opposed to, say, Pullman. And on the subject of one’s church, well… I had to ask about that, too, since that’s an important community in my life, and I needed to know if she had similarly strong ties that she would be reluctant to break.
In barely a couple of hours, I received another reply from her, but rather than addressing my questions, I found myself confronted with a wall of all but meaningless text:
I sometimes wonder as to how many of the people that are reading this letter over your shoulder are actually bots; if there are any, I probably shouldn’t be giving them advice as to how to better fool humans. Still, one would think that, if one is running a lonelyhearts scam, one would bear in mind that their target, thinking that he’s talking to the potential love of the rest of his life, is going to study “her” letter for any clues about her personality – thereby running the risk of him spotting any inconsistencies in “her” biography, so “she” has to make sure that “she” keeps “her” story straight throughout their interaction. Any one of these inconsistencies might be overlooked – whether she lives in Evanston or Chicago, for instance; or that she’s supposedly been divorced, despite the fact that her profile listed her as being ‘single’ – but once enough of them pile up, it’s enough to create doubts in anyone’s mind, especially someone who has dealt with plenty of catfish already, and is quite suspicious of anyone he meets online.
It doesn’t help that she sounds like she trying to ingratiate herself to me by indicating that she, too, is the “victim of an unsuccessful marriage”; had she paid any attention to my profile, she would know that this description is as far from the truth as one can possibly get. Such inattention just adds to my suspicions about her. Add to that the fact that she “know[s] that [she is] charming, tactful, joyful, sociable and optimistic with a good sense of humor,” and I can’t get over how much she praises herself. Even if this were a real person, and not a catfish, I’d be put off by how full of herself she is – and if this is just a case of poor written communication skills, it still doesn’t speak well of her.
In any event, I simply finished up our conversation by correcting her misapprehension about my history with you, and the fact that we didn’t have an ‘unsuccessful marriage.’ What misadventures I’ve been dealing with in terms of relationships have been since your departure, and my attempts to find a match online, especially when dealing with catfish. I mentioned that I had planned to go into detail when we actually met face-to-face, and while I didn’t say outright that I doubted that would happen at this point, I did ask about several of her biographical inconsistencies that I needed clarification on. Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to get a reply about them, despite offering to give a clean breast of things on my own part should ‘she’ have any questions about myself; I doubt ‘she’ cares enough to ask about anything at this point. As ‘marks’ go, I’m already too much trouble to deal with, I shouldn’t wonder – although I’m surprised that more guys aren’t as suspicious and attentive to detail as I am.
Anyway, you can see why I rarely bother with the online dating world these days, as this is all too often the end result. Although, should she actually respond, I’ll keep you filled in as to whether this goes anywhere; I’m not expecting it to, but if it does, that would probably be a whole other story to tell, and an amusing one, at that.
Until then, however, I’ll have to ask that you continue to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 