Another Online Sweet Talker

September 12, 2007

The Sweet Talker wasn’t the only bad thing that happened to my friend Karin online. In fact it was a party compared to what happened later. This next guy was such a terrible experience it made her think seriously about giving up the online dating idea completely. I even agreed and told her it would be a good idea! Anyway, it was a few months ago. She was all excited one day and sent me a photo of this guy she just hooked up with on the date site, and this one was so AMAZING looking it even made me a little jealous. He was gorgeous, blond and tanned, like a surfer model from another planet, maybe planet HOT. Karin was walking on a cloud right away and it was no use getting her to talk about anything else. No wonder, because everything else about this guy sounded too good to be true.

She told me he was a petroleum engineer, just out of school and working on the oil rigs up in Canada. He told her his father was an oil executive and his mom was a missionary. They talked on the phone about three times a day.

This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, and it wasn’t, not yet at least. It actually made me kind of happy because Karin was so excited and focused. It was like an advertisement for online dating sometimes being like winning a lottery for some people. But I noticed right off that he didn’t seem to be asking many questions about Karin, or her life or anything. Guys can be like that, just thinking about themselves, especially hot guys, but this was strange. Still, she told me I was just paranoid, so that was it — for a week or so.

Suddenly gifts began to arrive at Karin’s place, nice gallant-gentleman gifts like chocolates, roses, big balloons and even a few teddy bears. Now she was talking about going up to Canada and never coming back, starting a family with him. Then she told me he’d called for like the fifth time that day to tell her his mom had been involved in an accident while doing missionary work in Africa and he needed to wire cash right away to make sure she was shipped back home to a hospital here. He asked her to contribute as much as she could and to ask her friends to throw in money to help. Right away after we hung up I went online to a fraud-busters blog and described the situation to people in the chat room. They kind of laughed at me and said that Karin had – almost – been the victim of a notorious online fraudster ring run from somewhere in Africa. The guy’s photo was a fake and the gifts were probably bought on a stolen credit card.

You can imagine how terrible it was to bring this news to Karin, but I did it right away. Nothing special for me or anyone else, I think, because friends have to help friends. She cut the guy off and I hope people reading this will always be careful, EXTRA careful, because who knows what’s out there anymore?

 

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Smart Girls Get Jealous

May 7, 2007

I am starting to think that smart girls get do get jealous. I first got this idea when I read a Necrofile article by satirist Donna Lypchuk several years ago about jealousy and survival of the fittest and now I have also stumbled across a professional opinion by Dr. Irving Walkoff – a psychiatrist based in Toronto.

Apparently when you feel those feelings of jealousy descend the more homicidal they are the healthier you are. This is because what you are really thinking about is not really the other woman or how he is betraying you but really – the next seven generations of unborn descendants. In other words, we are hardwired to get mad at anything that threatens our sexual life as the original intention of sex was to procreate. If anyone gets in the way of that procreation – we don’t survive.

Nobody escapes jealousy. It is a natural human reaction that finds its basis in evolutionary biology. It is a part of Mother Nature and has a biological basis. You find displays of jealousy in any animal species that tends to form pairs. The tendency towards jealousy is right in your DNA. Essentially, you choose a partner because you want their DNA to be attached to your DNA. The roots of this are ancient and Darwinian —part of “the survival of the fittest.”

Jealousy is also related to anxiety. Walkoff sees this anxiety as being somewhat good …”it propels us to propagate the species … hurry up and get on with it! It is also about protecting the nest”

Envy, which is a little lighter than jealousy also comes into play in most relationships. Rock describes envy as being “the frustrated longing for other’s experience. It is a different, more superficial phenomenon than jealousy. You want to be the person as opposed to be the person who is desired.

When somebody else threatens your relationship, you start seeing the meddler as somehow better than you — the assumption is that they are better at adaptation, better at seduction, a better parent … in short are more fit to continue the species than you … this triggers a fight or flight response in many people. Jealousy is there to protect you and your DNA — the desire to pass on your DNA.

Walkoff claims that “a little bit of jealousy can be a good thing. In a healthy relationship, the subject can be discussed between both partners. Often, in the end, both partners feel secretly satisfied, as the jealousy is evidence that the relationship is still alive and kicking. Love is killed by indifference — not necessarily jealousy. Jealousy becomes pathological when one does not allow the other partner to live a normal life.”

It might be perfectly natural to experience jealousy, but in most religions, this emotion is still considered to be ugly and morally repugnant. Maybe it might be a good idea for a guy not to cause an occasion for jealousy in the first place!

 

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