Virtual Partners

Growing up in geek culture, most of us knew somebody who always claimed to have a girlfriend “who goes to a different high school – you wouldn’t know her” or the equivalent. Some guys started early – I can recall one classmate who began this particular scam before we even got to middle school or knew about girls in the first place – while others would wait until all of their friends had girlfriends (or were trying to get one) and peer pressure got to them. Today, of course, this basic strategy has grown into the familiar “Canadian girlfriend” meme – which I imagine probably makes things difficult for Canadian ex-patriots who actually DO have a significant other waiting for them north of the border. But whether you’re doing it to look less pathetic or to pass for a straight guy, the activity has always been a mess of faked letters and emails, images of total strangers (some guys would just use the picture that came with the frame on their desk), and make-believe telephone calls – until now…

In hindsight, it seems fantastical that it has taken this long for such a service to evolve, but the Consumerist website is reporting the appearance of an online service that will pose as your girlfriend on Facebook – or presumably any other social networking site to which you belong. Called Cloud Girlfriend , the service claims that it will allow you to define your “perfect girlfriend,” whom they will then “bring to life” by posting various messages on the public areas of your Facebook page and such. You can then tell anyone who asks that this mysterious individual is your girlfriend, who lives in Canada (or Chile or China, or wherever you like) and that she can’t come to visit because of her school schedule, work demands, family obligations, or whatever fits best with her back story. Of course, this would appear to violate Facebook’s terms of service, and possibly several Federal laws (it depends on how you do it); it would also require quite a bit of effort to keep such an account current, since otherwise it would quickly become an obvious fake when other people couldn’t connect to it, exchange greetings, and so on. But by the same token, I don’t know how anyone would prove that such a “virtual girlfriend” didn’t actually exist…

Now, from the information available off the website (or, more accurately, the lack of it) there’s no way to tell for sure if this whole thing isn’t a hoax – or a scam. Certainly, I would advise caution to anyone who is thinking of sending money (or worse yet, giving a credit card number) to a site offering a service this hard to regulate or verify. For all you can tell from the site linked above, this could just be a more personal version of the venerable Penguin Warehouse scheme – a fake website that purported to sell live penguins as pets, but was never set up to take orders (and wouldn’t have been legal anyway). But even if the current “Cloud Girlfriend” site is bogus, this is one of those times when you can’t possibly get the genie back in the bottle. If no such service actually existed before this story broke this week, it’s probably safe to assume that it soon will…

Personally, I can’t see the harm in such an enterprise. I would never think less of someone because they can’t get a date (having fallen into that description for years at a time myself), nor would I start making uninformed “lifestyle” assumptions about them, but some people may feel more socially, personally or professionally confident if they have emails or wall posts from their extremely attractive and affectionate significant other who happens to be a virtual construct. It’s interesting to note that this is very clearly a Cloud Girlfriend service; it appears that everyone associated with it believes that only men would be desperate, needy, pathetic or conniving enough (pick the adjective that best fits your opinion of men) to want a virtual girlfriend in the first place. It’s also worth noting that all of the major Internet dating sites have been accused of creating “ghost” members – women (and very occasionally men) who don’t really exist – and fabricating messages from these virtual clients to real hopefuls using their service…

Which means that there is a non-zero chance that at least some of the people who sign up for “Cloud Girlfriend” service already have a significant other on the Internet who doesn’t actually exist…