Webupon

You join some kind of social network, maybe even a dating site. You meet people. Some of them make you sorry you ever logged on. One of the rules you must follow, in all relations with the Internet, is to mask your identity.

Whether it is a message board, but more importantly, when it is a dating site, mask your identity.

Don’t use a real photo of yourself, pin point your address, or share too much. People on dating sites are often desperate. They assume you are desperate. Even if you are, be very careful to disguise it.  Most people who use these sites want anyone they can get. And it isn’t just sex. Many want an all expense paid vacation in your house.

That ‘lovely’ man you’ve been posting to for three days might send a photo of a mansion implying he owns it. He might invite you to visit at some point in the future, while inviting himself to your house. It is not the meeting on neutral ground, it is that s/he wants to meet you at your front door with a suitcase, and set up housekeeping.

You are afraid to chase a promising suitor, yet don’t want to be rushed, stalked or the subject of an intense barrage of messaging. What do you do?

Firstly, you need to avoid real time communication, i.e. Skype or one of the instant messaging programs. If you’ve been using them, stop. Whether you close them and claim you were off line, or some other excuse, do it. Don’t make a situation. You don’t want to ‘lose’ the ‘love of your life’ but you don’t want to gain an insane stalker. You just need to slow communications to a crawl.

Once you cease the real time conversation, you might learn a great deal more about this person. When you see he wrote you ten emails in less than ten minutes, a flag should go up that he’s desperate. Not that he is so crazy in love with you but that there’s something else going on.

After all, he doesn’t know you. You’ve only been communicating a short while. Why is he acting as if he has some right to your time? Just seeing your inbox flooded with emails must prove to you that there’s something wrong with the interaction, that Real Time communication doesn’t as clearly display.

As prerequiste…NEVER USE YOUR REAL EMAIL ACCOUNT.  Create an account on hotmail or yahoo, or anywhere in which you lie about everything and use an obvious nickname.  Do not create; “JoanBrown” or even “Marigold”,  create an account as “JKLASD” or “Tennisisboring”.

Accounts such as these, which are obviously arms lenght from you instantly, AND I MEAN INSTANTLY deter stalkers.  The Stalker, as soon as s/he gets that address Knows For A Fact that his scams are going to be difficult to activate and Move On.   The real person won’t be off put. 

If you have not done this, you might find your real inbox swamped with messages, and will appreciate now, if you did not before, that there is something wrong here.  There is something wrong with a person who writes and writes without getting a response.

You realise that you have encountered a Stalker. Do Not Panic.  This is not a problem. Here is what you do.

Answer one of the series of emails he (or she) has sent with brief boring remarks. Ignore any demands s/he may make, because you owe him (or her) nothing.

During the course of the next few hours or days, where you slow communication to One response an hour, you will see who this person really is.  Although his intensity might frighten you or you might want so badly to believe he loves you, listen to your head, not your heart.

Continue to respond slowly and reticently, discussing other things besides you/him. If he is a normal person he will get the idea that he came on too strong or that you aren’t as interested in him as he thought.  You haven’t cut him off. A normal person will respond to your email and no more. A nut job will be confused. Cutting off a nut job provokes his insanity. Hence you do not do that. You simply write less and less often.

If you’ve been wise enough to create a false user and a false email address you can simply kill the addresses and the users.  If you haven’t, you have to make him (or her) Dump You.

You don’t know how crazy this stalker is.  You don’t know how much information he (or she) has actually gotten from your accounts, so your best response is to become dull, boring, stupid.

If he (or she) complains about your lack of response, or the time between responses, lie and say that you have a bedridden aunt you have to take care of or that your computer is acting up, whatever it takes, but the goal is to slow the interaction to a crawl so that he’ll lose his fixation on you.

As time passes and he realises you are not rolling out the red carpet for his arrival, and not all that interested in visiting him, the relationship will either grey to friendship or dissipate. A “normal” person will seek to maintain a chatty exchange of emails. A not so normal person won’t make that attempt.

The guy who expected to be sleeping in your bed next week and enjoying an all expense paid vacation at your house, will lose interest.  

You won’t lose a ‘possible’, for if he’s interested, he’ll keep writing and over time, sharing interests and experience you will build a relationship, and then, after a month, perhaps go back to the instant communication or move to telephony.

Always remember things are never what they seem in Cyber Space.