Dear Lady and the Scamp,
I'm in long-distance-relationship with a guy from a chat site. I really don't think he lies about anything and we share pictures a lot. We talk every weekday, never on weekends. But he always avoids me when I ask him to chat on camera, or to come to my country. Should I take him seriously?
Nath
Christine says:
Should you take him seriously? Well, it depends what you want out of this relationship. If you just want to talk 'on weekdays', look at pictures of him (if they are of him) and chat online then this sounds ideal! If you want more than that, then this guy sounds like a nightmare.
I would start to worry if I wanted to chat to a guy on camera and they didn't. Men normally quite like that because they don't have to move. You have to ask yourself why he doesn't want to. There could be several reasons
1.) He's completely genuine, but the wallpaper in his house is terrible. It was left over from the last people that lived there and he is very embarrassed about it. There is no way he is going to let you see he lives in a giant granny flower pot.
2.) He's currently got impetigo, a giant cold sore, or a carbuncle so big that they wouldn't even let him Skype into Embarrassing Bodies: Live at the Clinic for fear of losing repulsed viewers.
3.) He's married so can't talk freely. Chatting away to you in the lounge while his wife watches Downton Abbey would be tricky to say the least.
4.) He's not the guy from the pictures he's been sending you.
Or 5.) Both 3 and 4.
In my experience of online dating, anyone that won't put a picture up is instantly suspect. They obviously don't want to be identified which is weird as it's kind of key to the whole online dating thing. But even then you can only trust pictures so far as you only have their word they are actually of them and not their mate 'Hot Gary' from work.
I'm not sure how far apart you two are country-wise but you seem to be quite far apart relationship-wise. If he won't even chat to you face-to-face you have no hope of this ever going anywhere, let alone travelling to your country (wherever that is). To be honest do you want him coming to stay with you when he might actually be a 50 stone woman called Barbara.
Give him an ultimatum, if you likes you enough it might spur him on to redecorate and get on Skype, if not it will leave you free to find someone a bit less suspect.
[Related article: Why online dating is so addictive]
Kevin says:
Great, so you're in a relationship with a man but the only catch is you can't see him. And I don't just mean physically, I mean you literally can't see what he looks like. Sure, you've seen pictures of "someone" but how do you know that's him? It all sounds a bit fishy if he keeps turning down your webcam requests.
I can just imagine him now, trying desperately to track the down the hunk he took the images from and emailed over, claiming it was him. Now, if he even finds the guy, he has to convince him to appear on a webcam and chat to a gullible woman for an hour.
I'm not saying the dude is definitely lying, but you can't really consider this a proper relationship until you see some proof he exists. And what is the hell is he doing on weekends? He can't just disappear into a pod on Friday evening and emerge again on Monday, like some kind of weekday Dracula.
Of course there are various possible innocent explanations too. Maybe he's shy, or he's heard that the camera adds 10 pounds. Or perhaps he is embarrassed about where he lives, or he has loads of Spice Girls posters on his wall.
But you can't give him the benefit of the doubt. This is a classic online relationship problem: there are people out there on the internet pretending to be other people, loads of them. He might be 35 stone, or 85 years old, or a woman. He may not even be human. You just don't know.
Rather than devoting all your time to a so-called relationship with a man/woman/creature you will probably never see, let alone meet, why not focus on trying to get a date with someone closer to home?
