Despite the grief this whole saga caused me, this has recently been filed under Amusing Anecdote.

I typically do not discuss my relationships here, since I don’t believe it is fair to discuss the details of some other life without their permission. But I think I can make an exception here because this person doesn’t actually exist.

A couple months ago I was contacted by someone on my MySpace friends list, wanting to get to know me a bit more. I had a tendancy to add people to my friends list for no good reason. So I had some people on there I didn’t really know very well. So I started having a conversation with this woman, Chassity, and it turned out we had a great deal in common. We had phone conversations that lasted hours and hours. We really seemed to be hitting it off.

After about a month or so, we decided to meet for coffee. This precipitated a series of debacles in Chassity’s life that I won’t go into now because it would take too long. Anyhow, we weren’t able to meet. I was disappointed, but understanding. She said we could have dinner the following week, which didn’t happen. From that point on, whenever I brought up the topic of meeting for coffee or whatever, I would get no response. Somehow, despite wanting desperately to meet me, she never had a single spare hour in which we could meet. So I eventually gave up on the idea and we communicated less and less frequently.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by one of Chassity’s MySpace friends. Her friend hadn’t heard from Chassity in a while, she didn’t return emails and her home phone had been disconnected. Her friend thought that surely she would respond to me. By now our online relationship had become the stuff of legend amongst all of her MySpace friends. So I wrote an email, checking in on this mysterious woman. Of course, I received no reply. Her phone was indeed disconnected. Since her friend seemed really worried, I called up the radio station where Chassity had worked for the past eight years. No one there had ever heard of her. The receptionist, the radio personnel, her “boss”… none of them knew her name or description.

I felt the floor drop away from me as I entered some other realm. I wrote this guy I knew had met her in person because Chassity talked about hanging out with him, watching a movie. He said they had never met. I reported this all back to her worried friend. Then she said, “Well, YOU’VE met her in person, right?” I explained Chassity and I had never met. Her friend thought this rather odd because Chassity had given a detailed account of when we met at a goth club.

I was completely floored. Who was this person? Why had she fabricated this completely fictional life and deceived all of her friends online? Not just me, but at least 20 people. What did she have to gain from this?

I wanted to see if anything she had told me was true. Chassity had claimed to have performed in a play produced by a local theater group. I contacted the theater to find out more about the play. They had never produced the play she described nor did they recognize her. For whatever reason, she made up this play, described to me the plot and her role in it. Just like that, without missing a beat. But why?

What was true and what was a lie? The performance she gave was Oscar worthy. The nuances and tedious details of her daily workday… why would someone take the trouble to concoct all of that? For a while this really intrigued me. I wanted to know what had motivated this person to lie so convincingly about her life to so many people.

But then I got angry. I had trusted this person. We had discussed at great length the value of being genuine and how I had been burned so many times by fake people. She insisted she was real. She said her friends doubted *my* existence, that *I* sounded too good to be true. Everything we talked about, the emails, the long conversations, the discussions about spirituality, art, movies, video games, they did not add up to someone who was a liar. It still doesn’t add up.

After this roller coaster of feelings I rode with Chassity, I am left with this waking dream lesson: The person who is genuinely attracted to me and interested in me as a person does not exist. Chassity is the last in a long line of women who either vanish or only want me for something in particular, discarding me when they are done. I have seen little evidence that there is any other kind of woman.

So if you happen to see this person, chances are you don’t know her. Chances are that no one does. Chances are this isn’t her at all.