A catfish is a person who pretends to be someone they're not over social media, often with the intent of tricking someone into falling in love with them. The catfish uses someone else's pictures and a fake name, creating elaborate lies and excuses to keep their true identity from being exposed.
MTV's reality show "Catfish," inspired by the documentary of the same name, centers on catfishes in online relationships and has become a success in recent years. In each episode, the show's hosts Nev Schulman and Max Joseph helps a hopeful meet up with someone they have dated over the Internet for a period of time but never been able to meet. On the surface, the show's purpose seems to be to enable true love and finally uniting a pair of soulmates. This is not the case.
Although it might seem that the reason to go on a show like “Catfish” is to start a life with your true love, I would argue that the show isn’t about beginnings – it’s about endings. I would also argue that deep down the hopefuls know this. When you’re so doubtful about a person that you resort to going on national television to find out their true identity, you can’t reasonably expect to find that everything checks out and you get to live happily ever after. What you can expect, however, and what many end up finding, is closure.
While each episode of the show (usually) starts out with a hopeful wanting to finally meet up with the person they’ve fallen in love with over the Internet, this rarely ends up happening. Instead, they find out that they have been lied to for months or years, and more often than not they end up either cutting ties with the catfish or continuing their relationship in a non-romantic way. Interestingly enough, it is often the catfish themselves who reach out to MTV wanting to come clean and expose their own lies. Each catfish/hopeful coupling is vetted before the episode goes into production, and the producers know the gist of the outcome before Max and Nev even reach out to the hopeful.
So why do people still get catfished in 2016? More often than not, the catfishes on the show are very obviously hiding something, whether it be their true identity or something else entirely (although it’s usually their identity). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a model whose Facebook page is comprised entirely of iPhone-selfies should be able to video chat with the person they’ve been in a committed relationship with for three years. The research that Nev and Max does on the show is not revolutionary. For the most part, they do things that anyone with a computer and a phone could do. What separates them from the people needing their help might just be the guts to discover the truth combined with the resources to fly across the country to track someone down.
I would argue that the hopefuls on catfish are too stuck in a fantasy and blinded by love (or lust) to even be capable of looking at the other person with a critical eye. Even when they know that something is most likely not as good as it seems, they choose to ignore it so they can keep living the fantasy of the relationship. Finally meeting up with the person they've been talking to isn't the beginning of happily ever after - it is the ending of something that didn't really exist in the first place. The purpose, then, is to allow the hopeful to stop hoping and 'snap out of it,' so to speak.
This doesn't diminish the value of the show. Although "Catfish" has its critics, I'm still a big fan of it and believe that it does serve a purpose - to give the hopefuls on the show closure and help them move on with their actual lives. The Internet can be an amazing tool to connect with people in other states or even countries that you wouldn't otherwise meet, but there is a fine line between simply utilizing it to meet people and living the entirety of your life through social media and chat rooms. The latter is not healthy, and being stuck in a manipulative relationship for years on end can prevent you from building meaningful, real-life relationships. It can be hard to cut ties with someone who keeps making you ask yourself "what if?". The things we want easily overshadow the things we need, and sometimes we need that extra push to let go of a toxic relationship. "Catfish" can be that push.
