Te’o, Catfishing, and Virtual Relationships

So, Catfishing has become very mainstream recently. In 201o there was a documentary film called Catfish, coining the term. A TV show on MTV based on the film startred airing recently. But what brought Catfishing to America’s attention

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 was Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o. Acording to UrbanDictionary.com, a catfish “is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.”

Te’o had an online relationship with a young lady for a few years. He considered her his girlfriend. They converesed electroinically and spoke regularly on the phone, but never met. Near the end of 2012, Te’o's girlfriend found out she had cancer, and soon after he was told that she had passed away. 

What’s come to the surface recently is that te’o had been duped all along. The girlfriend he had feelings for never existed. Instead. on the other side of the computer (and possibly, phne) was another young man catfishing the football player.

What I deal with every week are people who want advice on had to handle their online relationships. I believe most are real, and not catfish, yet so many involve people couples who have never met face to face. they email, Skype, text and 

 

phone one another. When you do that, then your brain must fill in the gaps, the parts that you can only know when you are with someone in person. Therefore, when they fall in love, they are falling in love with a person that they have partially created.

When I was dating there were no such things as virtual relationships. The closest thing I had to one was with a girl I dated in college who went to study abroad for a year in Euope. We called once a week and sent letters to one another. The thing is, though, that I spent months with her face-to-face before she left. As a result, I can’t give firsthand experience of what it’s like to have a relationship with someone I have never met, but I can tell you that if you are fine with this and it’s fulfilling, then there’s not a problem with it.

The thing is, though, that there’s a whole dimension that is being overlooked when you have a virtual relationship. If you have never had a face-to-face relationship, you don’t know what you are missing. I don’t mean that negatively. My wife and I were married seven years before we had our first child. For years people told us we had to have kids. The love we would feel would be like no other we had ever experienced. Well, because we had never experienced it, we didn’t know what we were missing, and, as a result, we were fine without children.

Once we had kids, we realized they were right. there was another dimension of our relationship we had yet to explore. Looking back, we are so glad we became parents. If you are good with the online relationship, then keep at it. But, there is another dimension that you are missing, and once you experience it, you’ll never want to go back. I’m not going to tell you to meet face-to-facce, but if you do, at least you’ll know if you are being catfished by a 280 pound, 54 year old, out of work father of three posing as a 27-year old single female dental assistant… I’m just saying.