Are you tired of your friends considering you the #foreveralone charity case who needs to be set up with anyone and everyone until you find love? Do your parents pester you about the prospect of grandchildren and their dwindling hopes that you will provide them before their ultimate demise? Have you ever been compared to Ted Mosby? Does your grandfather ask you if there are “any live ones” every time he sees you or speaks to you? Are you trying to make an ex green with envy despite not really having somebody for her to be jealous of? Are you just trying to focus on work instead of relationships but don’t want people calling you an idiot for doing so? Are you gay and do not want people to know? Are you actively trying to live a lie because you’re just a through-and-through jokester?
Or: do you—for some strange reason we don’t really need to talk about–crave all of the benefits of a girlfriend without ever having to see her or be intimate with her? (I call this the “Manti Te’o Paradox.”)
If any (of all) of these apply to you, you might want to look into Invisible Girlfriend, one of the most bizarre (legal) services I have come across on the Internet, and I’ve spent a lot of time lurking in shady digital venues.
Invisible Girlfriend allows you to create a fake girlfriend, ostensibly so you can fool those around you into believing you have a significant other, at least for as long as they will believe this without, you know, actually meeting her in real life. (Which, in these times, can be a pretty long time. ‘Cause technology.)
But this type of app service doesn’t come for free. (Just like a for-real girlfriend, amirite guys?!) You can choose from three different plans: “Just Talking,” “Getting Serious,” and “Almost Engaged,” for $9.99, $29.99, and $49.99 per month, respectively. No word yet on how you’re supposed to fake an engagement, wedding and subsequent marriage—with children and stuff—but I suppose you have to cross that bridge (trolls and all) when you get to it. Maybe you’d have to get a real live prostitute to don a diamond ring so you could Instagram a photo of her left hand with the caption: “SHE SAID YES!!!!!” and then take it from there.
If you fork over the dough for the priciest package, you can get texts from a robot (which I’m sure are borderline Shakespearean and not at all easy to identify as fake), prompt emergency interactions with your pseudo-lover, enter a relationship on Facebook, request for notes to be sent to your work or home, and even have real live phone calls.
The app is pre-launch right now, of course, but because the waiting is the hardest part you can hit the website to sign up for more information as it is released. Hopefully by launch many of the obvious questions will be answered, like who will be talking to you on the phone and writing notes that they send to your goddamn home address.
According to the Riverfront Times’ interview with app creator Matt Homann, the app isn’t made to build a girlfriend that people can actually believe in, but is more geared toward giving clients “a better story to tell, even if the story isn’t true.”
So if you’re planning on using this app, be prepared to field questions about the verisimilitude of your relationship. You may want to use some emergency interactions for rehearsal purposes.
Or just find a friend of the opposite sex who is willing to help you out for a while, fake relationship style.* Who knows? The two of you might actually really fall in love, eventually.**
*One year, around my birthday, I changed my Facebook relationship status to “engaged” to a friend of mine who agreed to get in on the ruse. Hilarity ensued. So I can tell you from firsthand experience that something like this app could be entertaining, but there are ways to execute the same type of thing in a better and less expensive way.
**Dibs on this story. I’m already writing the short story. Srm5082@gmail.com if you’d like to option it for the big screen.
