10 Rules for Online Dating Learned from "Catfish"

There's no doubt about it: Catfish is one of the best programs MTV has picked up in a long time. Based on the 2009 documentary by the same name, the series stars Nev Schulman who, inspired by his own experience, goes around the country meeting people who have romantic relationships over the Internet with people they've never met.

He then, with the help of his filmmaker friend Max Joseph, attempts to uncover everything he can about the other person before staging a meet-up to find out if they really are who they say they are. It's compelling because oftentimes they're actually not, so it gives us a really good insight into why people feel the need to lie about themselves so intricately on the Internet—and how well they can do it, too.

In addition, the show has the ability to teach us important lessons about online dating, specifically, how not to become the amorous victim of an Internet con artist. To make it even simpler, Complex put together a list of 10 Rules for Online Dating Learned from Catfish, a foolproof guide to navigating the murky waters of the Internet social sphere. Take note, because with dating becoming increasingly digitalized, these could save you serious heartache and embarrassment.

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Written by Tanya Ghahremani (@tanyaghahremani)

In the first episode of the series, we met Sunny, a 21-year-old bubbly blonde who was convinced that she was talking to a model named Jamison from Mississippi. Though they’d never Skyped, Sunny was convinced that he was the complete package: Attractive, successful, and someone she was very compatible with. And, according to her, smart, too—Sunny wastes no time informing Nev and Max that he’s also in school to become an anesthesiologist, but since he’s always traveling for modeling gigs, he has to take all of his classes online.

Now, this should have been the first red flag for Sunny, as it was for Nev and Max. Anesthesiologists are physicians—they’re required to attend medical school and complete a residency in an anesthesiology program at a hospital. The poor girl could have saved herself a whole lot of time, trouble, and heartbreak (Jamison turns out to be a 19-year-old girl named Chelsea, which sucks) by just performing a quick Google search and/or using her goddamn head.

Hey, we get it—love, lust, infatuation, whatever, it pulls people’s blinders down. They want to believe that perhaps there’s some insane explanation for otherwise suspicious behavior, and they’ll tell themselves this often in hopes that it’ll eventually become a reality. But the important thing to remember, especially when trying to meet people in a forum so anonymous as the Internet, is to try and operate by the principle of Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is generally the right one, and that explanation is that they’re lying through their virtual teeth.

Perhaps we’re a bit early with this one, but it’s important: In tonight’s episode, promos show that we’ll be meeting a dude named Joe, who believes he’s conversing with Kari Ann Peniche, the 28-year-old former Miss Teen USA who has appeared on some classy reality shows like Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew and Celebrity Rehab.

The episode hasn’t aired yet, but we’re going to call it now: It’s not Kari Ann Peniche. Kari Ann Peniche is too busy with appearing on every version of Celebrity Rehab that she can. Kari Ann Peniche doesn’t have time to converse with guys who live in upstate New York on Facebook—and neither does the rest of Hollywood, so don't be that gullible.

OK, we’re not soulless, stone-cold people. Coincidences occur, and sometimes through the magic of fate or the right circumstances, people do meet someone who’s so completely compatible with them that it’s creepy. Maybe about a fifth of the time, this happens online, but most of the time it’s all just bullshit.

Take exotic dancer Trina’s episode of the show: She thinks she’s met the man of her dreams on Facebook. They share the same views on everything, have a good time talking to each other, she finds him extremely attractive, and—here’s the kicker—he’s a stripper, just like her. What are the odds!

Low. The odds were extremely low. Not only was the dude not a stripper, he also wasn’t the person pictured, and he hadn’t even told Trina his real name, which was Lee.

This is a classic case of something sounding way too good to be true: Chances are, Trina told Lee that she was an exotic dancer, or perhaps he saw it on her Facebook, and decided to say that he was too in an effort to bond with her. How many times in real life have any of us fibbed slightly about our interests in other to make a connection with someone?

They could be smaller lies in person, but behind a computer screen, where facial cues and body language can’t be seen to indicate dishonesty, any of us could say we were exotic dancers if we wanted to. We don’t, but we could, and that power alone should be enough to make people think twice before blindly believing what anyone tells them online.

If you’re going to embark on an online relationship, take every episode of Catfish so far as a cautionary tale: Download Skype, and if the object of your affections refuses to do the same, realize that something is very much awry. Every instance of deceit these people suffered could have been easily avoided by doing this, especially so in the case of Sunny and “Jamison.”

Sunny believed she was talking to a guy who was a model, and they’d spoken on the phone a few times, so she was absolutely sure that the man of her dreams was who he said he was. When they met, however, he wasn’t—in fact, he wasn’t even a he. How Sunny wasn’t able to tell that 19-year-old Chelsea’s voice didn’t belong to a male model who looks like this is beyond us, but her situation wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d firmly requested a video-chat date.

Learn from Sunny's mistakes. Otherwise, who knows; You could either be talking to the real deal, or some 45-year-old dude who lives in his mother's basement and trolls YouTube comments for fun.

You know those scenes in the Mission: Impossible movies where someone rips off a fake face to reveal that they're an agent in disguise? Internet dating can be a lot like that, with broken hearts and hard feelings providing the impetus for toying with someone's emotions.

Take Jasmine and Mhissy’s situation for example. Jasmine thought she was talking to a guy named Mike, but when Nev and Max did a little digging, they discovered a weird connection between Mike and Jasmine’s ex-boyfriend Triggs—not to mention that Mike’s photos were popping up on a completely different person’s Facebook page as well. Turns out, “Mike” was actually Mhissy, Triggs’s new girlfriend who had been using the identity of Mike to get revenge on Jasmine because of past events that had occurred between the two of them and Triggs.

Though this situation sucks, let's put that aside for a moment and take a look at Mhissy’s methods: It was especially easy for her to get the photos—she just found someone’s Facebook that wasn’t set to private and pulled as many as she could—and to make Jasmine believe that she was really Mike, she had two different male friends on two different occasions pose as him to talk to Jasmine on the phone. It didn’t take a lot of effort on Mhissy’s part, and the whole plot was able to go on for two years because Jasmine put her blind trust in someone she’d never met before.

It sounds jaded, but on the Internet as in the rest of your life, don't trust anyone. Everyone is conspiring against you.

The foundation of a good relationship (you know, the kind you have with people face-to-face) is trust, but believing in someone who you don't know is a recipe for disaster.

It’s important to remember that just because you’re being truthful, it doesn’t mean everyone else is. With people’s lives completely digitalized these days, it’s easy to craft a whole new life for yourself on the Internet using other people’s pictures and your imagination, which means that running into a fake person is a common occurrence.

Knowing how easy it is to fabricate an identity, you have to assume everyone is lying and take it upon yourself to look into all of their claims. Use Google's image search and see if those pics your new e-boo sent are duplicates. Read up on the career they claim to have or the places they say they've been. Nev and Max shouldn't have to do all the work for you. After all, it is your heart that's on the line.

While we can understand developing an emotional attachment to someone online, Catfish teaches us that it’s really better to wait until actually meeting a person before you actually decide to put labels on the relationship. The reasoning behind this is that there is a very strong chance someone could be lying, not to mention that it’s hard to maintain a relationship if you haven’t even met the person in the flesh yet.

Take Jarrod and “Abby”: Jarrod believed that Abby could be the one, and they were talking about serious things like moving in together. When Jarrod actually met Abby, however, it turned out that she wasn’t Abby, she was Melissa. Similarly, in Sunny and Chelsea’s case, Sunny was referring to “Jamison” as her boyfriend before she discovered that he was actually a she. Long-distance relationships are hard enough—there’s no point in making them harder by starting something with someone you have yet to meet offline who may not even be who they say they are.

Save yourself the heartache by not investing yourself completely into a relationship that is as flimsy as Internet connections can be.

Just like we all know not to check out Craigslist to jumpstart our love lives (Free massage offer posts are always made by murderers!), the same should go for Facebook. The average user puts a significant amount of their lives on their profile page, things that are meant to be seen only by those we’ve actually met in person. Privacy features are a huge deal for Facebook for a reason, because protecting ourselves from strangers on the Internet is important shit.

With that in mind, it really doesn’t make sense to friend random people on that site, let alone start conversing with them in more than a platonic fashion. As we’ve already stated, you can’t really know if a person is who they say they are behind a computer screen, and it’s not an appealing thought that someone lying about themselves should be able to see anyone’s real one.

If online dating is your thing, stick to the websites created specifically for it—on those, where everyone signs up with the intention of meeting up with someone, the worst you can run into is someone using an old photo of themselves, or possibly a cannibalistic cop. The latter is totally rare, though.

If you do manage to get to the point in your online relationship where a significant amount of time has passed and sentiments of adoration or possibly even love are being exchanged over IM, meeting at some point in the future should be a no-brainer, right?

Not if they’re lying! Take Kim and Matt, for example. They had been talking for over 10 years, and had formed a pretty solid relationship that Kim was sure could be love. Matt, she said, expressed strong feelings for her too, but apart from phone conversations he never wanted to take any necessary steps to take their relationship to another level.

When they finally did meet at the end of their episode, we find out why: Matt was using his real photos on his Facebook page, but they were from when he was in high school and substantially thinner. He didn't want Kim to see him until he'd gotten to a weight he was more comfortable with, which is why he was dodging her requests for a meet-up.

Really, it’s astonishing how many of these people were able to accept the fact that the person they claimed to have strong feelings for was making up excuses not to meet up with them, some even as ridiculous as having to go out of state for an emergency that conveniently occurred right before the set time. It’s shady behavior, and a clear indicator that someone’s got something to hide.

Has there been a happy ending in any of these episodes so far? With the exception of Kya and Dani, no, and even in their case, we’re not sure if they’re going to be riding off into the sunset together anytime soon. Online dating on sites like Match and OKCupid does sometimes work out for the best, but if we’re going off Catfish, where people are connecting on sites like Facebook and in AOL chat rooms, happy endings to online love affairs don’t exist outside of films like You’ve Got Mail.

Call us cynical, but really, it’s just realistic. Figuring out who someone really is when you know them in person is hard enough without having to wonder if they really look the way they say they do. If you take anything away from this show, it should be this: Your life is not a romantic comedy. It's more like a horror-comedy.