Worse still, my girlfriend – my actual, real-life, flesh-and-blood girlfriend with whom I live – isn't a fan of my new fake girlfriend at all. Whenever my Facebook girlfriend posts anything, my real-life girlfriend narrows her eyes and reads it back to me in a withering voice. Yesterday, while I was looking up a recipe on my phone, she yelled, "Are you texting your new girlfriend? You are, aren't you?" and then fell silent for three-quarters of an hour. This whole situation was a mistake.
Why did I buy a fake Facebook girlfriend? Curiosity, mainly. Name me one red-blooded man who wouldn't want to validate his neediness by paying a stranger of undetermined gender to send him hollow, misspelt platitudes on the internet. You can't, can you?
But I also wanted a glimpse into the thriving, fascinating fake internet girlfriend industry. For a modest amount of money – certainly far less than it costs to start and maintain a human relationship – a growing number of websites now offer the services of pretend social media paramours. Maybe they'll flirt with you on Twitter. Maybe they'll change their relationship status on Facebook. Some fake girlfriends will even phone you at work, presumably so you can bark, "Not when I'm in the office, darling!" then hang up, roll your eyes at your colleagues, walk home and cry.
It's a weird setup. Many of the services claim that they exist to make other women jealous – your crush will see that you're in a new relationship, realise that she's wanted you for herself all along and pursue you relentlessly until you're hers. It sounds unlikely, but apparently it works.
My Facebook girlfriend came from Fiverr, an online marketplace where everything costs exactly five US dollars. Want someone to optimise your CV? Five dollars. Want someone to write your name on their cheek in lipstick and photograph it? Five dollars. Want a stranger to say a prayer to a god of your choice? Five dollars, you numbskull. For a friend's birthday last year, I took a Fiverr vendor up on his offer to dress as a wolf, dance around his basement and film himself singing a personalised, free-form version of Happy Birthday. The finished product looked like something a serial killer might record seconds before turning the gun on himself but, hey, it only cost five dollars. It was either that or an Amazon voucher.
Fiverr is teeming with fake girlfriends. But what sort did I want? Did I want to remain amicable with my pretend partner, or break up spectacularly (one ad was titled: "I will be your jealous PSYCHO girlfriend for a week")? Did I want a deliberately submissive Asian girlfriend, or someone touting themselves as a "crazy angry Russian"? Someone who would "post the sexiest comments you have ever seen", or someone who didn't care if they had to be my girlfriend or my boyfriend, just so long as they got their five dollars?
by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Illustration: Lo Cole for the Guardian
