Internet dating gone horribly wrong

Dan Nied recounts how he watched helplessly as his friend found the internet girl fom hell.

By Dan Nied [send email]

It’s match.com, Yahoo personals and AOL chat rooms: The new way to fall in love, find a hookup or just a new obsession.

It is internet dating that is sweeping the nation’s singles, married swingers, perverts and recluses. It’s the perfect no-harm-no-foul way of getting around a fear of talking to the opposite sex.

And sometimes, it works. Sometimes the swingers find other couples to swing with. Sometimes single people find a spark through electronic personals. Sometimes perverts find other perverts.

Where bars or parties were once the only acceptable way to meet new people, now comes E-dating.

But it can be a nightmare.

Case in point: About a month ago, some girl sent my friend Mike an instant message out of the blue. There was no prompting, no prior chatting. Just a screen name and the information that this girl was something special.

She said she played club volleyball for her college and sent him a picture that ultimately made her one of the 10 hottest girls on earth. (Unfortunately, we can’t show the photo here. Just think of a bustier Camron Diaz with longer hair and a chest hugging tank top.)

So Mike goes with it. They start calling each other and getting to know one another. They hit it off so well that she decided to drive two hours to come with him to a party we were having.

There were about eight of us anxiously awaiting her arrival because the intrigue level was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Finally, around 7:30, Mike shows up with her as we were sitting on the lawn, drinking beers and having a good time. As they approached us from the adjacent parking lot about 50 yards away. It is apparent that this girl has put on a few (read 150) pounds since her photo was taken.

Not that big a deal. Tough luck, but we can handle that.

At 30 yards out we notice that her hair, which was long and flowing and straight in the photo, was crimped in the front to allow for bangs and curly on top. By all means it was atrocious.

Not good. Bells and whistles were sounding. The jig was up.

From 25 yards out, Mike made eye contact with my roommate Brendan. Brendan just covered his mouth with his cup and tried to laugh silently, as politely as he could.

From 20 yards out Mike, a dark skinned Italian, was blushing.

At 10 yards out, it was clear that Internet Girl’s nose, which was straight and cute in the photo, was hooked on a 15-degree angle and rivaled that of the Wicked Witch of the West. I half expected her to have flying monkeys attack us before midnight.

At 10 feet, she smiled as we were introduced and it appeared that her teeth, which were straight and white in the photo, were crooked and doglegged.

This was bad, really bad. There was no way this was happening. It was too…predictable.

From six feet out it was obvious that this was not the same girl from the photo.
Mike had been had and this girl had to be crazy.

At that point every one of my friends made an excuse to go in the house where the initial shock and awe wave of laughter continued for more than a few minutes. My roommate Jeff, who was upstairs looking on from his bedroom window, flew down those stairs and collapsed on the couch, gasping for air at this amazingly hilarious twist of events.

Mike was trapped for the night with a girl who had lied through her keyboard on the assumption that, when she showed up, he wouldn’t have the heart to tell her to go away.

Mike, had undoubtedly been done in by his urge for sex with attractive women, and he was paying for it dearly. He was being taught a lesson in karma.

And in between the schoolgirl giggles of grown men, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Internet Girl. Even though she had pulled an amazing stunt by fabricating this image of a culturally accepted attractive woman, only to show up as the opposite, I thought that maybe this was what she had to do to get attention from guys. Maybe this was her thing: the lying internet girl shunned by normal society, but accepted in an anonymous cyber world.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been laughing at Mike, maybe we should have been asking her why, digging through what had to be years of frustration over her square peg status.

But in actuality, we just kept laughing.

Around 10:30 p.m. Mike’s recent ex-girlfriend, with whom he’d just ended a five-year relationship, showed up and fed the laugh track a little more. Before Internet Girl showed up, Mike had hoped aloud that his ex would see him with this girl and become insanely jealous.

Needless to say that plan backfired. Although it took a lot of restraint to not tell his ex what was going on. She was probably confused enough to see her ex-boyfriend with Louie Anderson attached to his arm all night.

At one point I suggested that Internet girl show us her volleyball skills by getting a pickup game going on the lawn. I figured that since she told Mike she had been playing for 12-years, I wanted her on my team.

“I don’t know how good I would be,” she said.

YOU PLAYED VOLLEYBALL FOR 12 YEARS!?

Another lie.

To his credit, or his error, whichever way you look at it, Mike didn't call Internet Girl out. He took his lumps like a man. He hung out with her all night and resisted her sexual attempts (although, he did make out with her, which he admitted later, wasn’t fun)

In the morning, Internet Girl accompanied us to a Pizza buffet where she refused to eat more than a salad.

“I don't want your friends to think I’m a hog,” she said to Mike.

If she didn’t want us to think she was a hog, she shouldn’t have shown up looking like the offseason version of William “The Refrigerator” Perry.

And yes, you might say it is a little mean to make fun of Mike and this girl’s looks and normally I would agree.

But, the only reason I cared what she looked like is because she made herself out to be someone entirely different. We’re still not sure who the girl in the original photo was. We aren’t sure she even exists.

There is a theme here, and it is one of protecting yourself in a world where everyone can be anyone and people aren’t afraid to mislead you or lie outright.

Mike got had, he took one for the team. As for Internet Girl, well after Mike talked to her a few times and broke things off, I assume she went back to whatever it is she does.

The funny thing was that, as a few days passed and Mike ultimately called her on the photo fraud, Internet Girl never came clean. She says she had a thyroid problem and had forgotten to take her medication; an excuse I would buy if her face looked anything like the original photo.

I’m no doctor, so enlighten me, do thyroid conditions make your teeth crooked and your nose hooked?

It just doesn’t add up.

So, internet dating may be a wave of the future and it may be big business in the present. But it is still not without its fallacies. For every girl or guy who sends a model-like photo, there could be a 200 lb. Gorilla just looking to be held.

Mike just had the bad luck to find one that would drive 150 miles to cuddle.