Love Sick Read online

  “I want to see a scan of your passport,” I replied. “I want to talk to Hellie. I want a scan of your driver’s license. I know this is a scam, Danny.”

  “If you have someone else, just open up to me,” he lamented. He wasn’t good at this but I believe he’d studied up on Stockholm Syndrome. “When you see a scam, you will not know because they do things perfect and am not perfect because I am not a scammer. I [can] afford to feed you and your entire family for [the] next 20 year with what I have made in [Benin].”

  Whatever. I sighed and went back to marking essays.

  He tried once more, in August, to suck me in, with a complicated business in which I would be his beneficiary for funds transferred to my bank account. Instead of saying no, I made the mistake of saying it would have to be done through lawyers, which prolonged what was now simple tedium. After a few days of wrangling, he gave up. I breathed a sigh of relief that he’d tried me as far as he could and had gone away. I told Bette I’d finally scared him off. It was the first time she’d let me talk about him in two months.

  “Congratulations,” she said flatly and changed the subject to the weather, which was a heavy mass of sullen humidity along the eastern seaboard.

  We finished dew points off in fifteen seconds and the discomfort of what she considered my Benin lunacy scratched to be brought up again.

  “One of my students is Nigerian. I told him about Benin Boy. He said the problem is that there is an educated group of young people and no work for them to do. So they scam.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, now you know. How’s it going with the dating sites? Match, Zoosk—what else?”

  I started laughing. “You’ll love this. I got my daily matches from eHarmony the other day. Guess who one of them was? Eric! In a photo I took of him!”

  “Good God,” she said.

  “You know he wants to write a book about sexual networking, right? Building some sort of orgiastic cult, I think, culled from the Net and strip joints.” I laughed with as much genuine amusement as an executioner whetting his axe. “The only sex happening on eHarmony was his photo. I took it right after we’d had sex on his living room floor.”

  “Did you contact him?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “But I didn’t delete it, either.”

  “Do you look for trouble or does it just come to you, like dog hair?”

  “Right now I’m open to what happens, as long as it doesn’t cost me any more money than a membership fee or a good date. But consider the irony, Bette. I posted a profile on Ashley Madison to one-up him and received his profile on marriage-minded eHarmony. Maybe we were meant for each other.”

  “Fran—”

  “Just kidding. Besides, I one-upped him in the kinky sex department years ago. That’s how I met Dar.”

  • • •

  The thing about Romeo scammers is that as long as they have access to your email address, they will never go away. I took one demented misstep in my dealings with the Benin Bamboozler when I let him have my home address. One morning two weeks after Bette and I could relax and talk about anything again, I received a lovely, anonymous bouquet. I called the florist, who told me they were from Dan Foster but had no other information. I emailed my thanks and the next day he wrote to say a package was coming to my house, that it had a gift in it for me but that I should send the other contents on to him.

  The first package arrived from a mail-order linen company. He had expensive taste. I was almost amused at the thought of a skinny black guy living in a Third World ghetto prancing around in his organic Turkish cotton, 400 grams per square meter weight bathrobe, air drying after a shower and an initial dry-off with his even heavier towel set. Total cost of freshening up: $353.90.

  “I will give you the details to mail it when I get the shipping address,” he responded to my notice of its arrival.

  Five days later a big box came from Zappos, addressed care of Frances Kuffel.

  I was pissed off. The Bat Cave is tiny. It cannot hold one thing more. The volume of those towels was equal to a couch and now I had a box to contend with.

  “You gotta call the companies right now,” Bette said. “He definitely used a stolen credit card and you are now holding stolen property. That’s a felony, Frances.” She sighed in exasperation. “Don’t make me lose my respect for you.”

  An icy sweat broke out under my breasts and on my palms. “I didn’t know I was endangering your respect.”

  “Just call the companies this shit came from, okay?”

  Zappos confirmed it was a phony credit card and had UPS pick up the box the next day. I didn’t open it; I had no interest in repacking stolen goods. The linen store said the charge had gone through without a problem.

  “I’m going to hang on to the stuff,” I told the manager, “and I’m emailing you my phone number. Please keep the email and be in touch if you find out differently.”

  I wrote “Danny” or whatever his name really was that he had used a stolen credit card and the game was up. Then I blocked him from email.

  I knew he wouldn’t spend the money to wheedle me back by phone and I felt reasonably safe that he wasn’t going to show up at my door, although for the first time I was grateful that Daisy is the most prejudiced dog I’ve ever met.

  At the end of September I got a phone call from the linen company. He’d used a stolen credit card number, which meant he’d scammed some woman into believing in his Johns Hopkins degree, affection for gardening, beautiful needy daughter and being stuck in Benin.

  I mentioned the boxes to Tommy, the owner of the local UPS store. He told me that at least once a month, he has to call in the police because someone tries to send such care-of packages off to the Third World.

  Bette was right. I thanked her for watching my back.

  • • •

  I came across at least a dozen scammers in wandering through Internet Date Land. There are websites devoted to outing Russian and African scammers, most of whom are men posing as either sex. The websites warn of consistent misspelling, crimes against grammar, web speak and a fetish for emoticons.* They’re good signs except that as a teacher of composition, I know these mistakes are just as often made by Americans. All of the scams I came across used a variant of the guy being God-fearing as part of his self-description, and after a very brief exchange with “Steve” on OkCupid, I began to notify the website administrators each time I came across that phrase, along with other red signals. These include:

  Being addressed as “Dear Pretty” (or “Beautiful” or some such) rather than by my profile name (which varies between an Evelyn Waugh and a Jane Austen character)

  Initial emails that react to nothing specific about my profile (i.e., no “I like walks on the beach, too!”)

  A generic profile devoted to home life, weekends away, wanting a woman who is strong and honest, etc., but which lists no specific hobbies or interests of his own

  Being widowed (occasionally he will say he is divorced) with a child to care for

  An epiphany of interest upon seeing my picture (“There is something about you” or “I feel as if we already know one another”)

  His profile picture is way prettier than I am

  The two essential questions to ask are how he handles adverb endings and whether his email could have been copied and pasted twenty times in an hour.

  Each time I notified a website of suspected fraud, I received a note telling me the user had been deleted.

  Both Danny and Steve had a penchant for bad love clichés in their first emails: “I don’t know what else to tell you, but consider this: To laugh is to risk appearing a fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose feelings is to risk exposing of yourself.” Blah blah blah.

  As many scammer-wary websites note, Danny and
Steve immediately asked to communicate via Yahoo!, rather than through websites that try, and obviously often fail, to run checks on IP addresses before posting profiles. The more traffic they generate through an offshore IP address, the more likely they’ll be found out and blacklisted from a site. It’s easier to pull the wool over someone’s eyes by going straight to email rather than communicating through the site.

  Scammers pick out a specific American burg as their home, but Steve was stupid enough to say that he lived in Carroll Gardens, a neighborhood bordering the Heights. I asked him to meet me for coffee and he didn’t know where the Heights’s main thoroughfare, Montague Street, was and, anyway, he had been waiting to watch the soccer game that was about to come on. The next day he was headed to Washington on business that would take him to Nigeria. “Oh, not another one,” I moaned in response. “I suppose you’ll be awarded a large sum of money you’ll need my help getting out of the country, too.”

  “What you talking about, woman?” he screamed back, not knowing his diction was a dead giveaway.

  After notifying OkCupid’s administrator, I got caught up in researching Internet fraud. I found whole web communities, such as romancescam.com or scamdigger.com, which give you the tools to locate a suspect’s IP address and location, upload a photograph to match against other people’s experiences, and space not only for war stories but to add to the data on a scammer.

  I decided to see what Danny Foster’s photo brought up.

  A month after I returned the bathroom linens, he had conned a woman who was in the vulnerable position of just having lost a loved one out of a large sum of money. Two photos he’d sent me were posted, as were a number of “Hellie.” I was able to add a second email address, another photograph and the name of his “receiver” (who I suspect is one and the same as Danny Foster) in Cotonou.

  There is a similar aspect in the stories of victims: Many were especially vulnerable due to a death, divorce, breakup or other crisis. My dealings with Benin Boy began about seven weeks after Dar and I went to Santa Fe. I must not have been truly in love, I thought as I read these women’s backstories. It never occurred to me to send money, and my fantasies about the handsome man in the photos didn’t evolve.

  Maybe I’m smarter than other women.

  Or maybe the possibility that I would lose the foundational respect from my best friend was bigger than true love and feline-level curiosity put together.

  Thanks for having my back, Betts.

  Six

  The female cane toad inflates her body to prevent mating, making it difficult for the male toad to get a grip.

  Relying on a 2009 survey, eHarmony claims responsibility for “nearly five percent of marriages in America.” Their website doesn’t say whether this five percent is per year or of all marriages—nor, for that matter, does it define “America.”

  I was teaching freshman composition that summer and I was righteously anal about such vagaries. But then, the language of love is pretty much entirely corrupt.

  Of course I couldn’t delete eHarmony’s introduction to Eric. A day or two later, I couldn’t resist writing. “Well, well, well,” I said. “So much for eHarmony’s claims to infallible matches.” Eric responded that he was doing research for his book on sexual networking and that eHarmony’s claim of twenty million registered users is misinformation. Users do not have to be members. Registration is free and anyone becomes part of the pool of matches sent out to users every day. But if you want to communicate with one of those matches, you have to fork over between $23.95 and $44.94 a month. I had, in the interests of finding my “soul mate,” enrolled for three months, which is why I was able to write Eric. He had no curiosity about what I was doing there. Maybe he read my blogs after all. I occasionally wrote about my adventures and observations for this book.

  Getting people to spend money after promises of free membership is true of all websites. Each has its own hook, but the bait is that if you want to do more than nod at someone, one party or the other will have to fish out its MasterCard.

  The hook of eHarmony is that after quizzing users on the “29 Dimensions® of Compatibility,” each person receives matches that could lead to the Holy Grail: an LTR (long-term relationship) and ultimately asking her fat cousin to read 1 Corinthians while the skinny friends stand on the altar in shiny, unnatural dresses.

  Thus I discovered I am primarily a “Negotiator,” someone who dislikes both conflict and being crowded by her partner.

  So there are some problems with the 29 Dimensions® of Compatibility. The test sounds reassuringly scientific but don’t adults have some self-knowledge? Are we looking for compatibility? It’s a nice feeling but it’s not exactly in the troubadour tradition. A random selection of definitions from various standard dictionaries and thesauruses brings up the following matches for “compatible”: harmonious, consistent, able to be used with something, able to cross-pollinate, able to coexist together, able to be friends, open to possibility, in agreement, love (which Microsoft Bookshelf’s first definition of is “two hearts that beat as one”), capable of forming a chemically or biochemically stable system, capable of being used in transfusion or grafting, designed to work with another device or system.

  Basically, compatibility is terrific stuff for college dorm mates or the rearing of children. But for a dating site, admitting the meaning of compatibility would not sell memberships. The exception—love that is two hearts beating as one—is another concept designed by poets to fuck us up, and eHarmony’s success stories speak exactly that age-old jabberwocky of romance.

  “It was like meeting somebody I already knew,” one eHarmony bride remembers.

  “There was instant chemistry,” recalls another.

  “You get to see inside of the person before you see the person.”

  “We both realized there had been something larger than either one of us at work that day [we met].”

  “I felt as if I was finally home.”

  “I met my soul mate . . . I’m just so grateful.”*

  I may be a curmudgeon, but these people are mouthing the words of Hallmark and/or their preachers. I’ve had that dizzy, arms-open-to-the-night-sky-that-gives-diamonds feeling; I’ve met a man I think I must have known in another life. Despite being able to finish each other’s sentences, we both had a touch of altitude sickness and, maybe (at least on the men’s parts), wanted not to know what the other person was thinking before it got said.

  • • •

  A big problem with any other dating site’s correlate of the 29 Dimensions® of Compatibility* is that these tests rely on an unshifting self-esteem on the part of the hopeful member. When I was at my thinnest and most physically exuberant, I maxed out one of my credit cards on a matchmaking service that is now out of business. I’d profiled my feelings about myself and what I was looking for, made a video and sat back to see the men they’d choose for me. I wouldn’t have dated their candidates on the most ego-drained day of my life. Why did I receive these potential dates? Because on the service’s scale, they thought they were hot.

  Similarly, when I signed on for three months of eHarmony (for a whopping $134.85, or six and three-quarters hour-long walks with the most vicious dog on my ex-client roster), I was feeling both good about losing twenty or so pounds and defiant about apologizing for and hiding in my weight. I gave myself honest ratings on body size and I gave myself high ratings for being pretty and stylish.

  No one responded.

  Of course, the forty-one questions eHarmony asks allow for many other reasons for male silence, and I’ve never had a great deal of success with dating services that focus narrowly on the mainstream.* The writer-thing is weird, my income inconsistent, my aims in life vague. I hated the Guided Communication multiple-choice ice-breakers for being so narrow and, in general, the matches I received weren’t spot-on.

  “James” was a typical suggestion. He wa
s tall, had no children, and smoked—enough information for me to look deeper into his profile. The most influential person in his life was John Rothschild, his favorite leisure time activities were playing poker, racing cars, skiing and riding horses. Atlas Shrugged was the most important book he ever read.

  Dr. Warren? We have a problem.

  NASCAR and Ayn Rand are the two items in the world I am most contemptuous of. At fifty-three I was not inclined to take up skiing. I have no idea who John Rothschild is.

  He had two other answers that troubled me. He wished more people would notice “the depth of my soul” and one of his best life skills was “using humor to make friends laugh.”

  Never trust anyone who claims a sense of humor. He will depend on jokes rather than wit and will consider himself to be the funny one in the relationship. As for using humor to produce laughter, the composition teacher alarms in my head were deafening.

  Never trust anyone who uses the word “soul.” He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and will either be grossly disappointed in his partner or will expect marriage, with a fancy wedding cribbed from the Wedding Network, to last until the day one of them dies and the search for the fairy tale starts again.

  • • •

  The most popular quest on dating websites is the search for one’s soul mate. Hindu theology believes that couples are predetermined in heaven and that the soul, the animating spark or machinery of our minds and bodies, therefore has one mate. In Symposium, Plato’s study of the nature of love, Aristophanes relates that humans were once two-headed, four-legged and -armed creatures who threatened the gods so much that Zeus split them in two and as a result, humans are always looking for their other half (literally).

  I’ve taken the time to explore the hoo-ha of soul mates that is sold by the marriage-minded dating sites, because it is so widespread. While I believe the statistic is imprecise and self-serving, 2003 polls found that 80 percent of American daters believe they have one person out there for them but wouldn’t recognize him or her if they met. “My other half” is a concept that is absurd and, worse, insulting. If I buy into the idea that a boyfriend or lover is “the one person who can always make [me] smile, who shares [my] hopes and dreams, who makes [me] whole,”* then my report card at the pearly gates will be full of Incompletes. No one can induce me to smile all the time. My sanity depends on the evolution of my hopes and dreams. The men who could finish my sentences have left and I’ve changed a lot of my sentences.