Expect the unexpected...

This is about as exciting as my day got. It was raining and I was tired and my stomach didn't feel good. Nick and I found ourselves watching four episodes of a show called Catfish - The TV Show on MTV. It's about people meeting someone on Facebook and becoming close to them without ever meeting. The filmmakers then visit the person, usually in their late teens or early 20s, do some research on their internet buddy and take them to meet them.

The results in terms of honesty weren't great. All four of the people had lied about their names and two about their gender. Two of them set up fake profiles for the entertainment of pretending to be somebody else and seemed hooked on it. In this shot, the guy to the left in the grey T-shirt thought he was meeting a young blonde woman called Amanda, who just didn't happen to own a mobile phone. "Amanda" turned out to be Aaron, the guy on the right, who set up a female profile because he was gay in a rural area of the US where he didn't feel comfortable with it. Tyler, who thought he was meeting Amanda, had an expression like he'd just been told his dog had died. Needless to say, they didn't stay in touch.

It is obviously sensationalist TV which promotes the idea that the internet is full of weirdos and pathological liars. However all of the people featured on the show were vulnerable and were taken in by meeting who they thought was the person of their dreams. They had all recently come out of other relationships and were in need of comfort when they started talking to their internet buddy. Some of them were engaged without even meeting, which does seem too intense to me. But meeting people off the internet is safe enough if you are able to see people as they are, not as what you want them to be. I've met about 20 people off the internet, some from dating sites, but the majority I met as friends and it went well. I've never met somebody who wasn't who I was expecting. As long as you are alert to possible signs of strangeness and things that don't add up, I think it's often safer than meeting someone you know nothing about.

Nick and I met on a dating site but we didn't talk much before meeting up and it wasn't till we'd met a few times that we decided to be more than friends. Part of that is the practicality of living in the same city which none of the people on the TV show living in the US had. The internet allows people to become very close very quickly but you are only seeing what the other person wants you to see.

I posted this then wanted to edit it to add that my wisdom about these things comes from first hand experience of talking to someone online and really hitting it off, talking about meeting up but finding they get cold feet about it. Sometimes people just stop responding. It's a harsh world and there isn't much etiquette so you have to be very thick skinned and try to believe that the problem is with the other person, not with you.