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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Who was this attractive woman? Why did her story not ring true?

By David McElroy · September 20, 2019

Her name was Emily. She lived just outside Nashville. And she was interested in dating me.

That was in late 2002, which was 17 years ago. This is the only photo she ever gave me. We met on a dating site called Christian Cafe, where I met several women who I dated during that period.

Emily was smart and charming. She was attractive, but not so much that I was blinded by looks or felt she was an ego-driven beauty queen. She was just a fascinating woman in her early 20s — and we hit it off right away.

We chatted on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) at first and then started talking a lot on the phone. Within a couple of weeks, we were talking about meeting, but things came up at the last second each of the times we made plans.

And then the truth came out. Emily didn’t really exist.

After Emily and I had been talking for a few weeks, I got a call one day from a phone number in Nashville’s area code. A woman’s voice demanded to know who I was.

I didn’t like the woman’s tone and I told her I wasn’t telling her anything until she explained why she was calling me and what her business was.

This was Emily’s mother. She had found her daughter’s phone bill and looked through it, finding dozens of calls to and from me. She again demanded to know who I was. Trying to bully me is not a good way to get cooperation, so I told her I had nothing to tell her. She could either explain what was going on — and I could talk to Emily about it — or I could hang up the phone.

When she realized that bullying wouldn’t work, she shifted to virtually begging. And she told me the story.

Emily had been under a psychiatrist’s care for years. She had a history of making up fantasies and involving other people. She had done this once before with a man out of state — and her mother feared she was doing it again. She asked me what I thought Emily looked like.

While we talked, I sent her the photo I had. She gasped and said that wasn’t Emily. She had no idea who the pretty blonde in the blue dress was, but she said Emily was a very overweight woman who nobody ever wanted to date.

So did Emily exist? Well, there was a real woman named Emily. Parts of what she told me were true, but most of it was purely her imagination. There had been a number of very distressing things she had told me which had allegedly happened to her — some of them going on even during the period when we were talking — and none of them were true, according to her mother.

Basically, the Emily I thought I knew didn’t exist. In reality, Emily was a socially awkward young woman with no friends and no social life — someone who pursued fantasies in her head and pretended they were real.

By the end of our phone call, the mother had promised to let me know what happened next when she confronted Emily. After I knew the story, I was concerned for the real Emily. I didn’t know how her fragile mental health would handle being exposed.

I tried to call Emily, but she never again answered the phone for me. I sent her an email to tell her what her mother had said — and told her that I wanted to talk with her about it. She never responded. And her mother didn’t keep her promise to let me know what happened. She never responded to my emails.

The story simply ended right there for me.

By the time I got the call from Emily’s mother, I already had some suspicions about Emily. Some of what she was telling me didn’t quite ring true. Her excuses for canceling our planned meetings were pretty lame. And there was a time when she allegedly sent me a package of pictures, but they were mysteriously returned to her by the post office with the package damaged.

There was even a crazy story about her ex-best friend — a man — breaking in to her house and attacking her. She told me about injuring him with a baseball bat during the struggle and she told me all about the police cars at her house in the night because of the attack.

But I could never find news reports — even in smaller neighborhood papers — reporting such an attack, which would have been news anywhere. So I had suspicions that there was something wrong, even if I hadn’t quite put the pieces together.

I hadn’t thought about this story for a long time, but I was reminded of it by an episode of the NPR podcast Invisibilia this afternoon. It was an episode about the boyfriend of one of the show’s producers having his photos and information used by a man on a dating site who was doing exactly what Emily had done. He was a lonely man who just wanted to talk with women, so he stole the identity of another man and talked to women to fill the void in his life.

The show tracked down the man who stole the guy’s identity and talked with him, but none of the women who he talked with were found.

I don’t know who the blonde woman in the blue dress really is. I have no idea where Emily got that picture. I wonder how she would have felt if she had known that Emily was using her photo on a public dating site as a lure to find men like me to talk with. I’ll never know.

Emily’s mother thinks I was the only man Emily was talking with, because my number was the only one on her phone bill. In a strange way, that was a relief to me. Even if the Emily I knew wasn’t real, I liked knowing that I was really someone she liked a lot — as strange as that might sound.

The real Emily would be close to 40 by now. I have no idea what became of her. But even after all these years, I wish I could talk with her — to find out what made her so lonely that she pretended to be somebody else. I’d really like to understand.

I hope she got the help she needed.

Everybody deserves a chance to live a normal life and everybody deserves a chance to be loved. I hope she found a way to let someone love her for who she really was — without feeling the need to pretend to be someone she could never be.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: dating, fraud, love, online dating

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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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