Lovers have always told lies – but is it illegal?
A woman wants to make ‘catfishing’ a crime, but it will be hard to know where to draw the line
When I was in my last year of university I met a Hungarian maths prodigy, who was studying in Britain via George Soros’s scholarship programme. He wasn’t what you’d call good-looking (cosmetic dentistry before the Wall came down wasn’t so hot in Hungary), but he was charming, well-read and persuasive, to the point that I went to bed with him.
After a couple of months, he told me his return to Budapest was imminent and asked whether I’d consider going with him. I considered the question from dawn to dusk, until I bumped into a friend of his in the street, who casually mentioned my beau’s wife and children.
I wasn’t an exceptionally naive young woman and an old school friend of Hungarian extraction had told me sternly that most of the men from her country were incorrigible philanderers. So, at the very least, I should have heard a warning voice. All I can say, many years later, is that his claims to love me felt plausible at the time. And, who knows, perhaps they were. Perhaps he loved me and loved his family – or only loved one of these entities, or neither. Either way, I remain grateful to him for the following life lesson: women who consider themselves bright can prove to be the most gullible.
One thing that didn’t occur to me was that there should be some sort of law to bring my errant Casanova to justice. Anna Rowe, a 44-year-old teaching assistant from Kent, believes otherwise and is calling for new legislation to make “catfishing” illegal. The term was coined for the devious brand of love cheat who creates a fake online identity to lure innocent lonely hearts into a relationship.
Rowe herself was conned into a 14-month relationship with “Antony Ray” via Tinder, without realising he had used a snap of a Bollywood star as his dating profile and was lying when he claimed to be divorced and working in aerospace. The fraudster insisted he was passionately in love with Rowe and wanted to marry her, although after hiring a private investigator she realised that “he used me like a hotel with benefits under the disguise of a romantic, loving relationship that he knew I craved”.
It’s hard to read that sentence without a shudder of self-recognition at the vulnerability exposed. Who hasn’t yearned at some point to be made to feel complete by an impassioned soulmate? That longing is pretty much the template of Western mythology: Tristan for Isolde, Guinevere for Lancelot. And who doesn’t feel enraged at the cynical seducers who exploit that idealism in others? I entirely understand Rowe’s impulse to bring the scoundrel Ray to book.
Then I wondered how you’d draw up the law – where the boundaries of criminal deception in romantic relationships would begin and end. Could you be prosecuted for lying about your age, shape, status or general attractiveness? For saying you had a GSOH when you didn’t, as in Frasier? For dating two people simultaneously? I once told a suitor that I was a contortionist in a travelling circus. Would this now merit a fine from a magistrate?
Furthermore, the person who tells a string of pathetic lies that are swiftly uncovered by a sleuth may be less dangerous than the suitor who appears plausible for years, but whose psychopathy lurks at the deepest seam. Ian Stewart appeared to the entire world, including his sons, to be a blameless widower. The author Helen Bailey was preparing to marry him on that basis, believing he was her “happy ever after”. And yet for months he was plotting her murder and the embezzlement of her fortune.
Women aren’t immune from the practice of deception. A 2015 court case saw 25-year-old Gayle Newland being found guilty of sexual assault after assuming the guise of a man and seducing another young woman. The term “catfish” was popularised by a documentary of that name, which followed a cameraman who discovers the young woman he’s flirting with online is just a figment of a bored housewife’s febrile imagination.
Many families, my own included, can cite elements of elaborate personal fiction within living history. To this day, my family have no idea if my father ever procured a divorce from his second wife, whom he married in Greece in the Fifties. We did, however, discover that his mother wasn’t dead when he met my own mother, as he had claimed, but was resident in a psychiatric institution throughout the first 15 years of their marriage. Do these mysteries and evasions negate my parents’ great love for one another, the 25 years they spent together and their five children?
In other words, catfishing is the entirely predictable online extension of the practice of reinvention and downright deception that has long existed in the dating world. Learning to sniff out the harmless embellishment from the sinister is a key part of becoming an adult. If a date can’t present a coherent, researchable world of family, friends and colleagues, you’d do well to be wary of them. What’s the point of telling our children they must never assume that online gamer is who he says he is, if we don’t follow the same principles ourselves?