Catfish, Anyone?

Peter McKay
Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

In case you missed it (and it you did, you live in a cave) Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o recently got himself in a whole lot of hot water after he received sympathy and attention by announcing that his girlfriend had died. When reporters later discovered that the girlfriend had never existed, Te'o claimed he'd been "catfished", and that the girl was someone he'd met, and fell in love with, without ever actually seeing in person. The entire relationship was over the Internet.

Catfishing is a relatively new term, and basically means creating a fake online personality in order to fool someone you're attracted to into liking you. (Before the Internet, the phenomenon of pretending to be something you're not to win somebody's heart was simply known as "dating.") According to news reports, which have jumped on this story, it's happening more and more. The State Department has even issued tips for online dating so you don't get caught in a sweetheart scam.

A big part of this phenomenon is that more and more these days, people are meeting over the Internet. Recent studies show that somewhere between 20 to 30 percent of couples who get married today actually met online. This is a very disturbing trend and goes against nature. Over hundreds of thousands of years, nature has developed a very efficient breeding system: You mate with someone you find physically attractive. Most often, that results in a strengthening of the species. It's nature's way of weeding out the ugly. People with, let's say, weak chins are attracted to people with chins that are too big. You want to have children with someone who has the qualities you think you personally lack. I was first attracted to my wife at a college frat party because she had a great smile and hair. Some part of my genetic makeup knew that I had a rapidly receding hairline and tiny teeth that would be more appropriate on a doll than a fully-grown man. I desperately needed to find a mate who could counteract those traits or I would have tiny-toothed, bald children. (If you want proof of this phenomenon, look at your spouse, then go look in the mirror. Bet you look nothing alike.)
Updated: Mon Jan 28, 2013

In case you missed it (and it you did, you live in a cave) Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o recently got himself in a whole lot of hot water after he received sympathy and attention by announcing that his girlfriend had died. When reporters later discovered that the girlfriend had never existed, Te'o claimed he'd been "catfished", and that the girl was someone he'd met, and fell in love with, without ever actually seeing in person. The entire relationship was over the Internet.

Catfishing is a relatively new term, and basically means creating a fake online personality in order to fool someone you're attracted to into liking you. (Before the Internet, the phenomenon of pretending to be something you're not to win somebody's heart was simply known as "dating.") According to news reports, which have jumped on this story, it's happening more and more. The State Department has even issued tips for online dating so you don't get caught in a sweetheart scam.

A big part of this phenomenon is that more and more these days, people are meeting over the Internet. Recent studies show that somewhere between 20 to 30 percent of couples who get married today actually met online. This is a very disturbing trend and goes against nature. Over hundreds of thousands of years, nature has developed a very efficient breeding system: You mate with someone you find physically attractive. Most often, that results in a strengthening of the species. It's nature's way of weeding out the ugly. People with, let's say, weak chins are attracted to people with chins that are too big. You want to have children with someone who has the qualities you think you personally lack. I was first attracted to my wife at a college frat party because she had a great smile and hair. Some part of my genetic makeup knew that I had a rapidly receding hairline and tiny teeth that would be more appropriate on a doll than a fully-grown man. I desperately needed to find a mate who could counteract those traits or I would have tiny-toothed, bald children. (If you want proof of this phenomenon, look at your spouse, then go look in the mirror. Bet you look nothing alike.)

Internet dating, however, is based on solely on shared interests, and that's where the problem arises. People who spend a lot of time on the Internet usually end up spending way too much time on one particular thing. You may have an obsessive interest in something like, for instance, "Harry Potter," or possibly "Star Trek." If you followed Mother Nature's time-honored tradition, you are unlikely to meet someone with the same weird, obsessive interest, and your obsessive interest in that subject will be curbed when your new girlfriend tells you have to choose between her and your Gryffindor sweater. And the mating process would dilute your own weirdness, leaving your children with only a mild interest in learning fake spells or becoming fluent in Klingon dialect. If two Potterheads or two Trekkies get together, their children are basically doomed by genetics. They will be so quirky and weird that they will have no choice but to marry another weirdo, creating a whole subspecies of ubernerds.

The one exception to this rule is, as everybody knows, for those people who like to go to conventions where they dress up as furry animals. Those folks have to interbreed, because no non-furry would have them. If you reveal your "furvent" interests to someone on a first date, they will fake an illness, ignore your calls and warn their friends. If you wait, say, until after marriage, they will probably put arsenic in your puppy chow, and no jury would convict them.

The other big problem is that nobody is himself or herself on the Internet. Most people spend at least a few minutes trying to come up with the funniest, or most touching, or most interesting thing they can say before they start typing on Facebook. And nobody puts up an unflattering picture, either. Whatever picture you're seeing, it's one where somebody stopped for a moment, said, "I look gooood!" and hit upload.

So Te'o isn't just a victim of catfishing, he's a casualty of our times. You can order a pizza, watch a movie and buy flowers over the Internet. I guess the next logical step is doing all your dating over the web, as well.

All over this country, people who have similar interests are dating, marrying and reproducing based on similar web interests but without any thought to genetics. It took over a hundred years, but computer science has overtaken evolutionary science.

In just a few generations, things are going to be pretty weird around here. Also, it's going to get ugly.