Warning - this journal article is much longer and somewhat more personal than my usual commentaries
Over the past several months I have had some experiences
chatting with much younger women who somehow find me. In all cases I advise the young lady that I
am a widower and 75 years all. In every
case the women said that age is just a number, and they thought they could
learn from an older person. The problems
with chats are they are very time consuming, and I never know when there is a
hiatus or if the chat relationship is over. In any event, I feel that there is
nothing to gain by chatting with someone from afar as there is no chance of
meeting them in person. You never know
when the person is assuming another identity (catfishing). Inevitably the chat ends.
Let me relate a few
experiences:
I “met” Carolyn on Facebook when I made “friends” with her
when I should not have. She said she
lost her husband two years ago and had a five-year old son. After several days of chatting, she said she desperately
needed money to pay her rent. Like a fool,
I sent her a small amount of money. A
few days later she asked me for more money, and I refused. That chat ended but seven months later she restarted
the chat. She said she moved from West
Virginia to Ohio and the abruptly ended the chat again. Conclusion – Romance
Scam.
Connie read one of my Facebook posts and said they were interesting
and wanted to become friends. When we
started chatting, she said she was in the U.S. Army stationed in Syria. She started to call me Honey and Dear and
said I was her best friend. How could I
be her best friend if we never had met. Romance Scam. She asked me to buy her a Steam Card since
she could not use her credit card until she returned to the U.S. I refused and she ended the “relationship”. About a year later I got a friend request
from Tessa. When I saw her picture, it
was Connie. It was obviously a Catfish.
Allyson like Carolyn lost her husband at a very young
age. She has two small children and
lives near Baltimore. She was originally
from Memphis, but moved away after both her parents, husband, and sister passed
away. After a while she started to call
me honey and dear, so I suspected a romance scam coming. I was right as she abruptly said she had no
food in her house and needed money to feed her kids. Goodbye.
I “met” the following three women recently. All of them were Asian, in their mid-30s and
divorced. In the three cases they
claimed they got my number by accident on WhatsApp or Telegram.
I explained to all of them that I was old enough to be their father and
a widower and they said they could learn from an older person. “Age is just a number.”
Cindy said she saw my number in her company’s phone book,
but my name was not there. She worked as
a data analyst, financial risk analyst and fund manager in San Francisco. She lives in a large house worth over $1
Million so I was confident that she was not going to hit me up for money. We chatted for a while on Telegram. She even said I could stay in her house if I
visited SF and offered to meet me whenever she visited NYC for business. I had a brief video chat with her, but she
cut it short after a minute or two. She
offered me advice about buying bitcoins.
After I told her I wasn’t interested, she stopped chatting. This was about three days ago. Perhaps she was attempting to get a commission
on a sale of bitcoins to me. Who knows
if she will come back.
Anna who lives in Beverly Hills found me on WhatsApp. She seemed friendly and like the others were
not concerned about the age difference.
We had a nice chat about food among other things. I don’t sense any malicious intent on her
part, but I haven’t heard from her in over 24 hours. I will leave the ball in her court and let
her restart the chat if she wants to.
This last chat is ongoing.
Emily from Singapore and lives in St. Petersburg. I met her on her business account on
Telegram. She then moved the chat to her
personal Telegram account and said that her name was Genevieve, but I should
call her Gina. The chat has gone
reasonably well appears not to be a romance scam.
This is much longer than my using journal entries. Over the past 20 years I have written in this
journal since I find it easier to express myself in writing than it is
verbally. I have never been a good
conversationalist. I am careful with
these chat relationships as I will not give anybody money after I learned my
lesson from Carolyn. I sense that for
most of these chats there was no malicious intent from these women. I don’t understand why these women want to
chat was a man old enough to be their father. People must socialize in person
with people about their own age.
I have found it difficult to make new friends after my wife Karen
passed away. I have lost confidence in
myself in social situations. I am afraid
to get involved in dating again as I remember too many bad experiences decades
ago. I guess that is a consequence of
having an excellent autobiographical memory.
Subconsciously, I am using these chats as a substitute for dating.
Enough said!
