A friend of mine recently had his online identity stolen — as in, someone took his photo and name and posted a profile to a gay dating site. He recently found out about it when the online boyfriend Googled him and found the real guy, M., who is straight. The online boyfriend sent my friend 56 pages of IM conversations between him and the fake M. M. sent it to me.

I had two thoughts:

1. It’s super neat to be able to peek in on two people falling for each other. It’s such an amazing feeling to go through that yourself, but it’s almost as fun to be on the periphery, watching it happen.
2. After about page 3, it became clear that the impersonator was hiding something, which made me even more angry at the false M. The online boyfriend seemed like a nice guy who is looking for love and acceptance. There are few things worse than letting yourself be so open to someone and let them in then finding out that they betrayed you. I hope the online boyfriend recovers from this.

Two more thoughts:

1. Be careful when dating online! If someone doesn’t tell you his first name, run away!
2. I can now kind of see why people besides my friends read my blog. There’s something really sweet about going through those vicarious experiences.