“Please don’t be a creepy balding 40-year old. Please don’t have a pedo-mustache. Please, please, please don’t be a girl!” These are the words I found myself muttering on a Wednesday afternoon in front of Graves Hall where I was about to meet a guy I had chatted with on Tinder.
If you are unaware what Tinder is, as I was until my friend decided to take my phone hostage and make me an account as a joke, then let me give you the break down.
The app finds people who are in your area and connects through Facebook to see if you have mutual friends or shared interests. By “liking” someone’s picture, you give them the chance to “like” you as well, which creates a Tinder match and enables you to message that person if you choose. I’m not here to talk to you about Tinder and the perils of dating; I’m here to talk to you about how a little show called “Catfish” completely changed the online dating game in the past year.
The show is based off of the documentary “Catfish,” which followed Nev Shulman’s real online relationship. Shulman was deceived by a woman whom he was seeing online and talking to on the phone. He traveled to her home in Michigan to meet her, where he found it was the girl’s mother posing as her daughter, sending him messages and creating multiple fake Facebook accounts using a family friend’s photos.
The show, which premiered in November 2012, is hosted by Shulman and tells the stories of many others who have been in online relationships, some for years, and have never met in person. In the past, the only show that showed viewers the hazards of online dating was “To Catch a Predator.”
Those were simpler times, back when you could always count on Chris Hansen to come in and catch some poor low life 40-year-old with a glorious mustache expecting to see a 16-year-old girl. Instead Hansen would come waltzing in, and that sad, sad man would realize he had been caught and Chrissy wasn’t coming to meet him after cheerleading practice. Yes, those were the days.
Now “catfishing” has become an actual verb. Urban Dictionary defines it as “being deceived over Facebook as the deceiver professed their romantic feelings to his/her victim, but isn’t who they say they are.” Within a year the show has become part of our daily vernacular.
The second season premiered on June 25, 2013, and had 2.5 million viewers. You would think the people featured on the show would have turned to Skype, Facetime, Snapchat, Oovoo or maybe even a good old phone call to help them realize the person they are in love with is not real or who they say they are. However, the show continues to thrive on stupidity and people who are still baffled when they meet the person they’ve been in contact with, and they are not who they claimed to be.
With all the “Catfish” innuendos that go along with Tinder, I still decided to go and meet my potential new love interest. Surprisingly he was who he said he was. Believe me when I say I did the research beforehand to be sure of that, also known as “creeping.” So maybe “Catfish” tells some pretty sad stories that never seem to work out for the person on the show, but so far this sad tale is turning into a pretty happy one.
