You say you love him. He says he loves you, too. He knows your deepest darkest secrets; he provides emotional support when you are feeling low. When your situation starts to look up, he says, “I’m so happy for you baby! I knew this would happen.” You think he might be the one. The only problem is that the two of you have never met, and he doesn’t seem as if he’s in much of rush to meet you. You make excuses for him: he’s busy with his job as a firefighter; or, perhaps he’s simply too jet-lagged to meet up–after all, his weekend gig is working as a body-double on movie sets in California (although he told you that he actually lives in Florida).

If this story sounds even remotely similar to your real-life situation then you, my dear, may be getting catfished.

With the rise of internet dating, more and more people are ‘meeting’ each other for the first time in cyberspace rather at the local gym or cafe. And, just as people lie and mislead one another in real life, there are people who life and mislead those they meet online. Presenting yourself as other than you really are and forming a relationship with unsuspecting and naive individuals is a phenomenon that has become so ubiquitous it now has a name–catfishing–and a TV to entertain us with the tales of those who have been catfished.

MTV’s reality program ‘Catfish: The TV Show‘ follows Yaniv “Nev” Schulman and his co-star Max as they travel the country introducing couples who met online but have never actually met in real-life or Skyped online. Individuals who are wanting to meet their online boyfriend or girlfriend, but who have thus far been unable to, seek out Nev to have him make the formal introductions. Unfortunately for the regular folks seeking introductions, things don’t normally turn out to be the way that they seem–or the way that the person on the other side of the screen presented themselves.

The couples on ‘Catfish’ have usually been corresponding with each other for months or even years. They send emails, text, talk on the phone, etc. but they don’t have dinner or catch the latest movie together. They pursue their relationship like this with each for years; emotions run so high that they often begin exchanging proclamations of love. Then, Nev arrives to pull back the covers on the charade.

In one episode of ‘Catfish,’ a man thinks he is going to meet a transgendered woman. As it turns out, the woman is not transgered at all, but was born and still remains anatomically female; the woman also has a child that she lied about. The man has some confessions of his own. The picture that he gave the woman was not his, but belonged to a family member, and he had been using a fake name. All of these lies on both sides had been maintained for four years.

One young woman who had been talking to her boyfriend online for 2 years finally discovered that the person who she was talking to was actually another woman. The women who pretended to be a guy told Nev in a sit-down after being discovered that the reason she had played along with the ruse was to hurt the other young woman. Apparently, the two young ladies had some history together in the past that involved someone messing around with someone else’s boyfriend, and the women who pretended to be a man was getting her revenge.

Baffled, but trusting

Notre Dame football star Manti T’eo became the unwilling face of catfishing when it was revealed that the girlfriend whom he had publicly proclaimed died due to complications of a car accident and leukemia turned out to have never even existed.

Over the last year, Te’o–widely and publicly proclaimed to be the best defensive lineman in college football in the nation–helped lead his team to an undefeated season. Te’o a devout Mormon once said that the reason he chose to attend Notre Dame over the University of Southern California was because he had prayed about it, and prayer led hin to the Fighting Irish. By all accounts, Manti Te’o was a reasonably intelligent individual and smart football player, but despite his seeming intelligence he was bamboozled on the web.

According to Deadspin, the site which broke the T’eo catfishing story and has all of the details, Manti met a woman named Lennay Kekua via the social networking site Twitter and began to regularly correspond with her.

Lennay Kekua’s Twitter name was @lovalovaloveYOU from 2011 until April 2012, @LennayKay from April until September 2012, and has been @LoveMSMK ever since. Their interactions, by and large, consisted of mild flirting. By January 2012, they were a “couple,” and Te’o sprinkled #LMK (for Lennay Marie Kekua) throughout his Twitter timeline in 2012.

In an interview with Katie Couric, Te’o admitted that he discovered he had been lied to and that Lennay was not a real person, but he publicly continued the ruse that she had existed because of his owns shame and embarrassment over the situation.

As it turns out, the person who created Lennay Kekua was someone that Manti knew and apparently did meet in real life. That someone was Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a 22 year old who had once been a football in high school. Tuiasosopo has used the Facebook pictures of an unsuspecting female friend and represented those pictures as Lennay Kekua. And, according to a family member of Tuiasosopo, this incident was not the first time that Ronaiah had tricked people into a false online relationship.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is just the tip of the iceberg; there are many people out there who, among other reasons, create personas online with the intention to deceive. Carole Lieberman, M.D., psychiatrist and author of Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Love with Them, And When to Leave Them says, “People who pretend to be someone or something that they’re not usually do it because they feel that no one will love them for who they really are. We see this all the time with people who put up photos of themselves from 20 years ago, or claim to have a better job, or claim to have accomplished something special.”

After it was revealed that Lennay has been a fake, Manti made a statement to ESPN:

This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone’s sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating. It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother’s death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life. I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been. In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was. Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I’m looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft.

But the question(s) remain: Why and how are people like Manti T’eo fooled for so long? How can any reasonable person believe themselves to be in a relationship–sometimes for years–with someone whom they have never even met?

The desire for love and emotional attachment is real. We are human beings; we are social animals. We desire to have meaningful connections with others. And, as the proliferation of catfishing stories demonstrates, it is just as easy for us to develop what we feel are deep emotional attachments in the online world as it is for us to develop those same attachments to the person we have been going out on actual dates with. Just like there are predators at the corner cafe and down the dark alley, there are predators in the chat room and on Twitter.
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Jamila Akil is a Senior Editor at Beyond Black and White. She is writing a book tentatively titled Before Thirty. You can follow her on Twitter @jamilaakil