Lifestyles of the Fake and Lonely

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

Connor is 27, with green eyes and a dorky grin. His favorite emoji is the shaka (🤙), which he uses to express a casual DTF energy. He’s tan and toned, athletic yet approachable, and his profile photos resemble ads for a millennial lifestyle brand. There goes Connor, throwing up a peace sign on Runyon Canyon. Surfing as the sun sets over Manhattan Beach. A mirror selfie, an action shot, an abdominal V.

Connor is your average thirst trap next door. Also, I created him in the palm of my hand.

The photos are a friend’s. Sorry. Not a friend’s. A friend of a former roommate of a distant acquaintance’s, the hottest friend of a former roommate of a distance acquaintance I know. I found them on Instagram, screenshotted a select few, and cropped out the identifying details with no one’s permission but my own. It felt harmless, or fun, or necessary, somehow, in the way chronic loneliness can make you believe many unnecessary things are necessary.

I know. I’m sorry.

I tapped my way through a popular gay dating app’s sign-up flow, uploaded the photos, and invented a person. Connor is a software engineer, though if you ask him what kind he’ll have to home-button his way out of the conversation. He grew up in L.A. but just moved to “Willyburg.” He says “haha,” not “LOL,” which takes some getting used to. He almost never exceeds one line of text. He is calm, cool, and Objectively Hot.

“I’m so glad we matched!”

“Hiii!”

“👋😊😅”

Shaka.

And this isn’t Grindr, either, but a newer, more ostensibly ethical and supportive queer app. A safe space, until I came along.

I match with everyone. For three hours, I mainline approval like the approval-hungry human I am. It feels like I’ve unlocked another dimension. I don’t have to tread the waters of small talk or drop gratuitous exclamation points to telegraph how happy I am to be here — my matches do that. When I’ve played this game as myself, a 32-year-old gay man who is not a model, it’s slower. Harder. Connor is my cheat code.

“You seem really genuine,” a man named Brandon messages me at midnight.

What I’m doing is wrong, I know that. I chat with 20 smitten or merely very horny gay men, deceiving them with every message. In queer communities, like the one I’m in, catfishing is everything we’re afraid of: We fear that people will prey on our sexuality, take advantage of our vulnerability, pretend to be someone they’re not when we’ve overcome so many hurdles to become who we are.

Catfish, a 2010 documentary that follows Nev Schulman as he meets his online crush, popularized the now-ubiquitous term for someone who creates a fake identity to seduce others online. An MTV show starring Schulman followed. It’s staged and sort of fake (the liars, counterintuitively, are cast first) but still, every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Schulman gives us a window into the psychology of people who pretend to be other people for attention. We see the loneliness, the misdirected attraction, the sunken faces behind the avatars. Catfish lurk in basements. They flirt in fear. Many of them are deeply sad, staring into the blue light of their monitors as they masturbate.

Most of all, they are not like us.

I thought if I could honestly write about hiding behind someone else’s face, about being one of the cringey anons blacklisted by tech platforms every day, if I could live with this in my Google search results long after I’m dead, probably, I could understand not only myself but also Them. The people our parents warned us about. The people we warn ourselves about. The people they make lurid MTV shows about, the people who abuse the tools we’ve built to facilitate connecting with ourselves and each other.

Also, if I’ve done it — as a well-adjusted person with a job, and friends and family and followers — others have, too.

For hours, Brandon gives me his undivided attention. I laugh out loud when I type “haha,” and there’s that unlocking-another-dimension feeling again. He tells me about growing up in a small town near Savannah, Georgia, his single mom, and the courage it took for him to move to New York City. I almost tell him I am not who he thinks I am, but I don’t. I come. I ghost. I like Brandon. We’d be perfect for each other if I weren’t pretending to be somebody else.

Isn’t that always how it feels?

I realize, somewhere in the 11th hour of being a 27-year-old software engineer who lives in “Willyburg” and has an abdominal V, that this is an exaggerated version of how I feel on the internet every day. Connor may not look like me, but neither do most of the decade-old photos of my face that proliferate on the interwebs. I have never, not once, felt like myself while using Twitter — and when I’ve met internet friends IRL, I always feel like they’ve lowkey catfished me, too (You mean you don’t look like that, and you’re not as funny as your tweets?). We use soft-focus headshots, spend hours crafting tweets we hope will appear off-the-cuff, and recycle years-old accomplishments ad infinitum. The internet is revolutionary because it lets us manipulate our identities to meet our needs — and if Insta-fluencers are any indication, we’re manipulating them more than ever.

We blur the line, we hold people at arm’s length, we fade in and out of relationships as often as we want. And none of it matters. And all of it matters.

Connor is like me in some ways: He needs to have a good Sunday in order to have a good week. He’s looking for a relationship, not just a fuck. He likes routine. He read that book and listened to that podcast. Yet, Connor allows me to feel more myself than I ever will in my own body. Behind his green eyes, I don’t draft, delete, and retype my texts. I explain myself. I listen. I connect. I speak in tight, declarative sentences. He’s like makeup, or a tailored suit, or a well-lit profile photo. On the internet, you have to become someone else in order to fully be yourself.

At 3 a.m., I privacy-setting my way out of this identity. Am I sure? Am I ready to delete the elaborate, half-stolen mask that somehow unlocked connections with people I’d otherwise have never met? I tap, and Connor fades into the internet’s graveyard of forgotten avatars.

Maybe next time I’ll have the confidence to play this game as me, whoever that is.

Keep exploring the Internet Time Machine.