Catfish

I don't always watch the most, um, highbrow television.

Not that BBC channels we get here aren't trying their hardest to provide me with hours and hours of the History of the Canoe, the History of the British Meat Pie, and the History of the River Cottage Stone Wall.

Sometimes, in fact, when work or life gets too intellectual, and I've just read a bunch of journal articles about goal attribution theory or other such constructs, I need myself an hour or two in front of decidedly sensationalist television. Times like that, even Project Runway can be too refined.

A while ago, I put an MTV show called Catfish on my iTunes favorites list. It is based on a guy who supposedly had an internet romance in which he was severely deceived. The woman he thought he was in love with didn't even exist, and he found himself talking to a woman 15 years his senior, who had pretended to be woman in the Facebook photos. Anyway, he has now embarked on a project to connect others with their online loves, regardless of whether or not the people at the opposite ends of the computer are who they said they were or not.

Spoiler alert: most people are not. At least not the halves of the internet romances who have said they are models, who only send one photo of themselves in the course of a 3 years internet/phone romance, and especially those who say they have no way to Skype. Yeah, definitely suspect those ones.

Why even watch this show?

And yet, this morning as I was working on bills,  I had bought an episode and was half watching, as a woman found out her Swiss love was actually born a woman and going through a gender reassignment process. And even though she found out all of this, she was still in love with this person she'd been talking over the phone to for 2 years, never having met. It was such a beautiful ending to a terrifying situation for the transgender individual, fearing being laughed or left, once again. And here was this woman who said, nope, I love you and I'm not going anywhere.

It was exactly the kind of thing I needed to see after all the news this week.