It’s more like a bunch of videos, but man some people are just nuts!
That was interesting.
If you have the funds, hire the Spanish actor/model to move to your friend’s town for a summer and court her.
What would bother me the most is that the boyfriend had to depart in a dramatic way. Inventing him in the first place would make me distrustful, but people mentioned a number of acceptable excuses she might have for acting this way. But when she wanted to get rid of him, they could just have splitted. No need for him to die.
That added drama would make me suspect something is seriously wrong. Maybe she’s one of these mythomaniacs who keep making up dramatic events to attract attention? Maybe, as already mentioned, she was at the contrary the victim of such a person, and actually believes in the existence of this boyfriend and that he died recently (I witnessed such things twice very early on a pre-internet network, which made me very aware of this possibility when it comes to online romances)? Maybe, as someone else hypothetised, she’s having mental issues?
I have no advice to give about how to react (except that I wouldn’t try to mess up with her mind, by stating you made a donation in his name or whatever), but it would make me very warry of her, and I would probably confront her privately about it, if only in case she would be the naive victim here, rather than the perpetrator.
I’m going to recount these anecdotes, because one of them was really strange. The first one was pretty ordinary, as these things go. Some woman (who had been identified somehow) would keep starting online romances dotted with dramatic events. When her story finally crumbled, she would make up another persona and start a new romance with someone else.
The second one is weirder, in that the drama was real and at the contrary hidden. There was this young couple (early 20s?) in love roaming around the site (sort of both a chat room and a message board). The girl was OK, but the guy was pretty horrible : racist, insulting and harassing people, abusing privileges, breaking all the rules of the site and never getting sanctioned for it despite many, many complaints.
In truth, the boy was genuine, but the “girl” was in fact the much older wife of the site owner, dying from cancer. When he (the site owner) discovered she had created this persona and was virtually involved in a romance, instead of putting an end to it, he indulged her fantasy. The boy was told the truth only after the woman’s death.
She wants the narrative to die. No more questions.
I am still mourning the loss of Raoul Julia (and yes, I know he was Puerto Rican not Spanish).
Ack, missed the edit window.
First, I misspelled the name Raul Julia.
Second, he died of a stroke, not a heart attack. (Damn it, I knew he died of a heart attack … except, he didn’t.)
::Clears throat::
Let’s pretend that post above never happened, shall we?
I assume you’re all figments of Cecil’s imagination, made real online thanks to the wish of a boy with a pure heart.
If this is the benign reason she chose one of the most dramatic ways possible for the relationship to end, it wasn’t a good one. I guess it fits the MO of someone who would engineer the type of situation Cathy did, which is being terrible at lying. You can tell anyone who asks, “I don’t want to talk about it, I’m too upset,” whether your boyfriend died or you broke up and people will be about as understanding either way.
What makes him dying a bad lie is that in addition to not accomplishing anything more than a breakup would, it’s also very unusual. Instead of being an incident that will fade from people’s minds, this will be something that gets thought of from time to time by everyone that knows about it. The strangeness of the situation and the things that don’t add up are more likely to stand out as time goes by.
I recently watched “The Woman Who Wasn’t There”, a creepier version of the same idea.
I can assure that I am most definitely maybe probably real
or not
Plus, it gives her the added benefit of time to mourn her lost love before the ‘so when you gonna start dating again’ questions start coming in.
As to why a 40 year old woman would make up a boyfriend, that requires a bit of background that 'Dopers are not going to have.
If she is a good person, let it go. You said she had a bad year. People do odd things when times are tough. And in too many cases, people are too fast to jump on others when this occurs instead of trying to understand why someone would act in an odd manner.
When I find myself in these odd types of situations I tend to ask myself the following:
Did the persons actions hurt anyone?
Is it going to hurt anyone in the future?
Is the issue serious enough to inform some authority (Law enforcement, Child Welfare, etc)
Can I understand why someone may have done what they did?
Do they need professional help?
If they need help, am I the one to try and arrange that help?
Besides professional help, is there anything that I can do to help that doesn’t cross my personal boundaries?
Is it likely to happen again?
In other words, as long as no one is being harmed and the person isn’t in danger, help if you feel you can. But be careful about getting dragged into something you don’t want to own.
If there is a reasonable* chance someone is going to get hurt, get the proper authorities involved.
Slee
*Of course, defining reasonable is seriously hard.
Thank you all for the advice, thoughts, and smart-ass remarks, I appreciate it.
I am, for those who asked, very real. Or at least my jaw is, which had a tooth pulled out of it yesterday. By an alleged “oral surgeon”, but I think it was just some random dude who’d bought a lab coat and some pliers. (So I’ve been asleep on painkillers for a day.)
Anyway, there is more to the fake boyfriend story. It’s just too fantastic to believe. He’s allegedly some financial expert guy whose clients fly him to their private islands. Okay. That could be possible. So it didn’t ring a bell. But the background is just too weird.
Today she’s posted some of this guy’s history, which includes being rescued as a child from an abusive situation (where there were 6 dead kids) by an antiterrorism guy, who she’d been dating before. It was seriously weird stuff.
And my ability to sympathize for a sock as she’s posting all over FB is pretty low. In 2011, my real-life, real-person fiance’ really did die of a heart attack, so I’m irritated that she’s posting all this nonsense for sympathy. I realize that’s my issue, but it does not lead me to provide sympathy for a fake boyfriend.
Anyway, right now I am going to not feed into the sympathy bid and distance myself from conversation about this guy. Dog, yes. Mom, yes. Fake boyfriend? No.
Sounds like she needs some cats.
She has two dogs that are her world.
Ironically, I’m the crazy cat lady. :rolleyes:
Man, it’s not like she’s even trying to make it real and plausible. “Oh this bad thing happened, and then this, and then he did this! and then this! and now he does this!”
She must have never been a writer cuz you cannot make a character THAT dynamic
While it’s definitely possible that Cathy is either knowingly lying or is suffering from some sort of delusion, this sounds to me like she’s been the victim of a catfish.* Based on catfish stories I’ve read about and posters we’ve had here who were pretending to be people they weren’t, the above sounds pretty typical of a catfish. So does George Glass’s sudden death.
*Or is the victim the catfish and the person with the fake persona the fisher? I’m not sure about the terminology.
Ya know what? I think you may be on to something.
After watching the catfish videos linked in the Dr. Phil post this seems highly probable. She (Cathy) may have been duped all along.
If by interesting you mean cruel.
Cathy sounds like she’s lonely and sad. The OP should be her friend, not her interrogator.