CATFISH: The Television Show

About Catfish: The TV Show 

How do young people who've embraced the digital age find love? Often, it's by connecting online with people they've never met in person. These days, messaging on iPhones has replaced the dinner date, and emailing through social media sites often substitutes for face-to-face conversations. The problem with this approach - the guy or girl you've fallen for could be lying about who they really are.

Now, from the producers of the acclaimed documentary film, Catfish, comes a new MTV series that brings together couples who've interacted solely through their LCD screens. Over the course of months or years - these romantics have become smitten - but what will happen when they meet in real life for the first time? 

In each episode, with the guidance and help of the star of the Catfish movie, Nev Schulman, and his filmmaking pal, Max Joseph, a hopeful romantic partner will go on an emotional journey to discover the truth about their significant other. Has that object of affection been telling the truth? Will true love truly blossom? When that fateful knock on the front door finally comes - only one thing is certain - that these incredible voyages will be filled with mystery, uncertainty, forgiveness, joy, and sometimes, even shocking revelations. 

cat·fish [kat-fish] verb  

To pretend to be someone you're not online by posting false information, such as someone else's pictures, on social media sites usually with the intention of getting someone to fall in love with you.

original site and further information here

ROMANCE SCAM STRIKES WITH MATCH.COM AGAIN

Valley News Live - KVLY/KXJB - Fargo/Grand Forks

(U.S.A.) She says she gave up everything for love, only to find out it was all a lie. It's what investigators call the romance scam.

Carolyn Benningfield says she had the all-American life - an Air Force husband, two sons, and a middle class home. But after her husband died three years ago, she felt lonely.

"I was looking for a good Christian man and I went on Match.com," said Benningfield.

And after a few months and a few misses, Benningfield thought she found her match - a widow from another town who shared her Catholic faith.

"I thought my dreams had come true."

The two hit it off early this year, chatting online every day. But soon the conversation turned to money, when the man said he'd lost his luggage on a business trip to Ecuador.

"He asked me if I could loan him $1,000."

So she did. But as time went on the requests grew larger, he convinced Carolyn to invest thousands in his oil company.  She sent dozens of transfers to different accounts he claimed were used by his company, $40,000 to a bank in New Zealand, 3,000 each to people in Russia and Ecuador.

She never met the man and now believes he was using a false identity.

"The banks tried to warn me but I decided not to believe what they said because in my heart I felt it was true."

In the end, Benningfield gave the scammer all she had, a total of almost $800,000. She's also facing a potential tax lien on her home for emptying out her 401K.  Benningfield reported the fraud to Police, but since it involved international money transfers she had to take the case to the FBI.

Benningfield says she still keeps in touch with the man, in hopes that he might want to give some of the money back.

original article found here

ONLINE DATING CAN BE A POOR WAY TO FIND LOVE

 by Key Sun, Ph.D.

Some people believe that recent research on online dating/matching sheds a new light on understanding attraction, love, and romantic relationships. I argue that, however, although the internet has helped few find romantic relationships and marriages, the research has overlooked various defects and problems associated with this type of "contact." I will examine a couple of them.

The research findings can be summarized as followings:

1. Online daters tend to fill in the information gaps with positive qualities in a potential partner; on the other hand, everyone wants to make the self appear as attractive as possible to potential dates by exaggerating the self desirable traits.

2. There are gender differences in both preference and messaging behavior on online dating sites. Women weigh income more than physical characteristics, and men sought physical attractiveness and offered status-related information more than women.

3. The service users preferred similarity on a variety of (mainly demographic) categories (including child preferences, education, and physical features like height, age, race, religion, political views, and smoking).

It is accurate to say that the research findings showed some behavior and attitudes of the online daters who joined the internet community with different motivations, expectations and backgrounds, but it is inaccurate to assume the behavior and attitudes reflect real interpersonal attractions. This is because the online dating/matching (as provided by the commercial websites) lacks the basic ingredients for developing real love. The most evident problem involves its use of several categories (plus a few photos) for the daters to predict and decide the effectiveness and success of their further interactions with one another. This type of artificial "contact" contradicts the process of meaningful interpersonal interactions (to be explained), which generates love and attraction.

To explain the problem, I need to first elucidate the ingredients for love and the meaningful interactions.

The basic ingredients for love
As demonstrated by studies on interpersonal attraction, creating and maintaining love involves validating communications between the partners on a variety of issues, including understanding and concern for the partner's personal and emotional needs, developing companionship, physical attractiveness, cultivating and nurturing physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual well beings, respecting, supporting, forgiving, accepting and encouraging, expressions of appreciation and affection: sexual pleasure and fidelity, commitment, shared activities, as well as the absence of controlling, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling, and blaming, among other factors.

To accomplish the above tasks, the partners need to engage in the meaningful interactions (face-to-face interactions, including both verbal and nonverbal communications), which allow one person to give to and receive from the other. (Although online daters may be able to exchange messages after they pass each other's initial screening on the basis of evaluating the category-based information, the process is the opposite of the interaction-based attraction). The meaningful interactions depend on two factors: (1) the right opportunities (the right time, place, persons, and further communications) and, (2) the right mind (absence of biases about the self and others).

The right opportunities are significant. Although psychological research on attraction has identified several variables, such as disclosure reciprocity (revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others), mutual eye gazing, mutual reward, similarity and physical attractiveness, these variables are worthless unless people who possess the attributes and tendencies have the opportunities to implement them to the targets of attraction.

On the other hand, the right mind is more important factor. Why have some individuals who have encountered good opportunities of meeting their ideal mates lost the chances to develop the desired relationships? The answer is that mostly they have the dysfunctional mind, with the emotional baggage of fear, anxiety or other mental conflicts and past hurts in interpersonal situations. They fear experiencing invalidation from the target of attraction because they use superficial categories to define the self and others as well as to predict the effectiveness of their possible relationships, ignoring the affection messages from the real people who are attracted them. All categories are just the maps or substitutes of social reality, not the reality itself. When people use categories to predict an interaction (but not pay attention to the other's real communications, they will produce two outcomes:
a) avoiding love from right individuals, and,
b) approaching the wrong person(s).

This kind of distorted cognitions can only be rectified through the regular and meaningful interactions, which help individuals find out that they are worthy others' love and appreciation.

The problems with online dating
It is clear that online dating has at least two problems. First, it is an opposite of face-to -face interaction. Second, it does not help heal the emotional pains of some online daters. Online dating is a category-based, rather than an interaction-based process. In the category-based process, one uses some concepts to predict both possibilities of acceptance and rejection by the others. It is an artificial type because both rejection and acceptance by the daters are not about the rejection and acceptance of real persons, but of the imagined or perceived attributes of their categories.

People never fall in love with categories (even eHarmony's use of personality traits as the basis of matching does not represent real diverse human experiences and characteristics), because only real interpersonal process can create the feeling of love. Love is created and maintained by the process of meaningful communications (including validating accurate perceptions and invalidating inaccurate perceptions of interpersonal reality). Online dating cannot do so. Additionally, love is highly individualistically based. One loves another person because the Mr. Right or Ms. Right is unique individual in one's eyes.

I make a distinction between online communications and online dating/matching. New computer technology has greatly expanded people's potential and freedom to communicate with one another, some of which may generate love and romantic relationships, but online dating/matching, at least in its current format, has restricted the freedom.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOUND HERE