I don't know about you but I remember being a teenager watching the Catfished tv show and just couldn't believe that people could do that to another person. Even all these years later when I downloaded an online dating app, I kept thinking back to what I'd seen on those episodes and it genuinely made me a bit skeptical when it came to meeting someone on one of these apps incase something like that happened....little did I know!
Catfishing refers to when someone uses someone else's pictures and information to create a new identity for themselves. This can be done to trick people into associating or doing business with them but nowadays its more commonly used to trick people in the online dating world. Catfishing is not always done to be mean, it can be done for several different reasons including insecurity, mental illness, to experiment with their preferences, but it can also be done to harass someone or to get revenge.
I met....let's call him Jim (names are all changed in this series) on a dating app and I didn't listen to my gut feeling that something wasn't quite right with him. I tried my usual trick of reverse searching the images which didn't bring up anything so I presumed he was legit. How wrong could I be?! Unfortunately they turned out to be a very different person to the one in the pictures and when I found out and questioned him, he stated that his BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) was the reason why he pretended to be someone else and honestly at that point I was just done with it all. I'd been pretty skeptical about it for a little while and boy should I have listened to that little voice telling me something wasn't right sooner.
I am already pretty skeptical about online dating apps, this has pushed me to be even more weary of them. I'm a pretty old school dater, I still believe in dates, flowers, actually meeting people in the real world. To be honest since this happened I've really suffered with my health (and you can tell cause I've been missing from my blog and social media) so I've basically taken a time out from dating. I am truly that person that believes it'll happen when it's meant to happen for you. So this year I'm making myself the main focus, I want to fall back in love with myself and life again because I truly believe that before you welcome another person into your life, if you don't love yourself and your life then how are you going to welcome someone into that?!
I don't know what's next for this series as I'm writing them just as the ideas come to me so please let me know if there's anything you'd like for me to write a blog post about. I'm open to pretty much any ideas so leave them all in the comments below.
What's your online dating horror story?
Speak to you next time!
