The Catfish Phenomenon
under Date Night,100hookup,Online Dating,Single LifeYou give yourself two full hours to prepare for your date. Though it is probably futile, you give your all to get ready to meet the astronaut-supermodel-doctor whom you have been talking to via 100hookup for the past day and a half. You are so focused on a good impression that you even wash your pants. (Of course, you already know that pants are always clean no matter how many times in a row you wear them. Come on, they’re pants. Who washes pants daily, or even weekly? You do? They can get dirty just like every other item of clothing that you wear? Duly noted. I will write that on my fictitious bulletin board.)
You drive slowly to pick up your future astronaut-supermodel-doctor wife in order to look at yourself in the rear-view mirror as many times as possible. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have noticed the shaving cream on both sides of your neck or your big ugly face. You reflect on all of the joyous online conversations the two of you have shared. She trusted you enough to tell you, a relative stranger, that she is afraid of bugs, while you have already told her, in great detail, about your obsessive-compulsive disorder and your fear that you may never love again. You remember finding it peculiar that in every photo she has shown you of herself she is wearing a mask. Also, she has refused to talk to you over the phone.
As you pull up to her house you notice the fact that it is not a house. You also notice that it looks more like an abandoned tool shed. There are no cars, or tractors, to report. There is, however, a mailbox in front of the shed as well as a satellite dish on the roof. You vaguely remember her telling you to not be surprised if you notice that her house looks a lot like an abandoned tool shed. You park in the street and walk up to her “house” with a bouquet of flowers in your hand because you are a romance movie stereotype, and she is, apparently, a farmer with no farm. You knock on her…siding. A middle-aged man opens the siding flap thing and welcomes you in. He said he’ll “go to the back” to get your date. There are no rooms, it is just a tool shed. He makes a loop around the inside of the tool shed and tells you that although she will not be available tonight, he would love to be taken out to dinner. You realize that you’ve just been “had by the farmer” as they say. (Nobody says that.) You make a run for your car.
Okay, this never happened, but the lesson is to not blindly trust people…or something.