After quarantining myself in the bedroom with my fiancée working in the living room, my phone pinged with another notification. Someone was sending me messages on Reddit. They were asking me to share pictures and describe my turn-ons. Perhaps later they would send pictures of their genitalia. Only, it wasn’t exactly “me” they were messaging. Earlier that day, I had created a fake Reddit account pretending to be a 25-year-old woman (when, really, I am a man in my mid-thirties) to elicit messages from strangers.
It wasn’t the first time I had done this. I am a serial catfisher.
I’m young enough to have grown up knowing what catfishing was: the act of pretending you’re someone you’re not online. But I never thought I’d actually be someone who engages in this duplicitous behaviour. My earliest memory of catfishing was 10 years ago on Facebook. I came across someone who was scamming people and I thought to myself, “Let me mess with her.” This prompted me to create another Facebook account under a new name by swiping an image of a guy from Google Images. I didn’t plan it out. But it worked: the Facebook scammer responded to my messages and I pretended to seek out her services, before I lambasted her for taking advantage of people.
I didn’t feel bad in the moment, as I thought she deserved it. But looking back now, that moment set a dangerous precedent. It gave me a sense of comfort with not being myself on social media. In fact, I enjoyed it. "This was thrilling", I thought to myself. Shortly afterwards, I created another Facebook account, this time as a twenty-something woman. I joined several Facebook groups for singles, posted as this fake woman, and began to have sexually explicit conversations with the many men who messaged me.
This started an online addiction that has taken me from Facebook to dating apps to, now, Reddit.
My catfishing often consumes entire days, taking me away from work, friends, and other responsibilities. I leave texts from friends and family unanswered, opting to work on my catfishing instead. Even when I started online dating (as myself) and met my then-significant other, the catfishing didn’t stop. Eventually, the addiction extended beyond Facebook to other platforms, as I found myself creating a fake account on OKCupid, the same dating app where I met my ex-partner.
For me, catfishing produces a nasty combination of excitement, shame, enjoyment, and guilt.
While entering into a serious relationship with my ex-partner, I was simultaneously enthralled with the excitement of catfishing. This time, it felt different. In a way, I felt like I was becoming this new woman I was pretending to be. It wasn’t a fleeting moment of catfishing; I actually invested time and energy in crafting a persona around this fictitious woman. I created a Twitter account and even considered expanding my catfishing “enterprise” to Instagram.
This fake persona lasted a few months until my ex-partner found images of the girl on my phone. At first she thought I was cheating. I’m not sure which is worse. After having a tearful conversation where I opened up to her about this rare addiction, we agreed to break up but remain friends.
After the break-up, the catfishing had finally ceased. It helped that I was still living with my ex in a “platonic-friends-supporting-each-other” kind of way. This was also the time I entered into therapy as a means to manage the addiction. When I first told my therapist about my catfishing tendencies, I wrote about it in a letter to her because I felt too much shame to say it out loud. I told my parents about seeking out a therapist, but I didn’t mention specifics; I didn’t want them to know they had given birth to a catfisher. After the news about therapy, my mom burst into tears and lamented that she felt like she had failed as a parent. Imagine how she would have felt if I told her the whole story.
This catfishing-free life lasted a good couple of years. That is, until I inevitably moved out — because you can’t live with an ex-partner forever – and found my own apartment. This prompted me to resume my bad habits as I had begun using Reddit, first as myself as a way to combat the isolation of living alone. But soon, the addiction overtook me and I started creating fake accounts again.
It was around this time that I met my fiancée, which gave me more reason to try to curb this addiction. Some efforts proved successful as I had deleted Reddit from my phone and found replacement behaviors to distract myself. But, like any reliable addiction, it found a way to break through and I soon found myself installing Reddit all over again.
Why do I do it? It gives me a sense of excitement and stress relief, not to mention validation and a means to cope with my depression and anxiety. But at the same time, I feel like blaming my mental health is a cop-out. After all, many people living with depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues don’t become catfishers.
For me, the compulsion produces a nasty combination of excitement, shame, enjoyment, and guilt. I get caught up in the act of catfishing, temporarily oblivious to the impact it has on my relationship, my life, and the people I lie to online. But once I come out of it, the guilt overwhelms me. I feel trapped in this perpetual temptation-shame cycle of feeling the urge to create a fake Reddit account, engage in the usual catfishing behaviors while hiding in the bedroom, and then feeling ashamed and deleting the account, before the temptation hits me all over again.
My duplicity undoubtedly has an impact on those who were on the receiving end of my lies. In some cases, I am caught instantly when someone finds my fake photo on Google Images or Facebook. In other cases, the recipient will ask me to verify my identity — which, of course, I can’t do. And then sometimes the conversation will go deeper, until the person asks to get together if they’re local, and I will suddenly ghost them. They don’t know I’m deleting a fake account. To them, they made a connection with someone who suddenly disappears.
To this day, I still question why I do it, what I get out of it, and why I can’t seem to stop. But one thing is for certain: I’ve stopped before, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to do so again.
