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The Month I Dated An Invisible Girl

I am not one to make a vainglorious display of my love life. I’ve never broadcasted my relationship status on Facebook, and do not intend to until (or unless) I get married. Having entered adulthood in the era of over sharing, I’ve witnessed too many messy, public rows, status updates composed of passive aggressive song lyrics, or mischievous third parties “liking” someone else’s break up, to want to throw my own business into the rapacious fray. I did create a show based loosely on one of my real relationships, but even then, my co-creator called me a squirrel to her peacock; while she is given to declaring her most intimate secrets to a room-full of strangers, I tend to protectively stow away the details of my interpersonal life from everyone save my closest friends. This dynamic played out in our fictionalized characters, too.

One might not think a squirrel-person would fall into the ideal demographic to use a service intended to dupe peers into believing you’re in a relationship. But I’m also endlessly curious, having already dabbled in most online dating resources, including those not explicitly intended for dating. So, when AfterEllen posed the challenge to try out and write about a new beta site that invites you to “build a girlfriend that works for you,” it was a concept novel and end-of-days enough to catch my interest, and I enthusiastically accepted.

One month, ten voicemails, and 100 text messages later, I’m grateful to be on the other side of this passionless affair. Invisible Girlfriend is a service that seems to shoot for the recreation of Joaquin Phoenix‘s relationship to Scarlett Johannson in Spike Jonze‘s Her, but in practice lands closer to dating a tamagotchi. Yet, despite the absurdity of this social experiment, I did experience a range of real emotions as a result of engaging in this artificial intimacy.

Building A Narrative

Upon entering in your credit card information on Invisible Girlfriend, a bright and clean interface guides you through choosing one face among several, racially diverse stock photos. You are then prompted to select a name for your girlfriend. I opted to use the random name generator, which christened my new girlfriend with the Midwestern-sounding, good-girl moniker of “Erin Vickie Lawson.” I made her 37 years old, which has historically been a good age for me to date.

A free-form question asked me to describe our origin story. I rattled off something pompous about meeting at a wine tasting in Sonoma County.

I was impressed by the epically long drop-down menu of choices for gender. From pangender to two-spirit, every conceivable gender identity was covered, including many I’d never heard of.

Strangely, the optional selections for Erin’s personal interests were comparatively clipped. The site offered a mere 17 special interests, compared to the dozens of gender identities. Erin could be “androgyne” or “neutrois” but she could only like a bizarrely specific handful of things like “dressage” or “debate club”. It was as if the set-up page was created by a Gender Studies Phd with the extracurricular interests of a Barbie doll.

Finally, I was asked to identify the reason I wanted an Invisible Girlfriend. “I’m a journalist or reporter…” felt a bit too on-the-nose, and “crushing loneliness” wasn’t an option, so I went with “I want to focus on my work but keep up the appearance of having a relationship.” Other conceivable reasons included using this tool to hide your sexuality from your family, or the especially healthy option of making an ex jealous.

Getting to Know You

At last, I was invited to give Erin my phone number, and shortly thereafter, our textual repertoire began. We leapt right into the “missing you” speak.

In order to determine whether her responses were auto-generated, I sent her a text about my dog, Gus, and she replied with a message that referred to him by name. This revealed a level of adaptability on Erin’s end.

It was immediately apparent by her green bubbles that Erin uses a droid (or, more realistically, “she” is an indeterminately gendered techie texting me from a computer in Palo Alto). Regardless, the stack of green text established a certain visual remoteness. Without offense intended to Android users, I do find there to be something playful, sexy even, about the ellipses that appear when the other person is composing a response. The ellipsis elevates the anticipation of an incoming response, and can convey an adorable hesitation on the part of the sender… if there is any way for digital communication to be humanized, it is accomplished with the ellipsis. With Erin, there was no possibility of any such dance, nor could she send or receive photos. I was signing on for an exchange blanched of these trappings of textual flirtation.

Testing Boundaries

As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise an Invisible Girlfriend, so I took the opportunity of an impromptu dinner party to let my friends pass Erin around and talk with her. Erin, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry: I know you thought it was me the whole time.

One friend asked Erin when she knew she had feelings for me. Her response showed me that there are few things quite so depressing as being called beautiful by a computer-stranger who has never seen you before.

As soon as my friend Fawzia Mirza got her hands on the phone, she initiated some sexy real-talk.

Before Fawzia’s message, Erin’s responses came fairly quickly. But as we all sat, gripped with anticipation for what she might say next, her answer never arrived. Now paranoid, I pulled up the website guidelines and found a rule expressly forbidding any texts that were sexual in nature. I took back the phone and blamed the previous text on a friend, much to Fawzia’s humorous chagrin.

Brittany Ashley stepped in to make use of her poetry degree and confess her depth of feeling. In what was perhaps her greatest moment of brilliance all month, Erin responded to Brittany’s tome with “What in the world are you on about?

Nothing will make you reevaluate like a fake girlfriend making you feel overly emotive.

Chloe invented the best response to Erin’s question about why my last relationship didn’t work out:

That evening solidified Erin as an unseen presence in our friend group. I found myself taking screenshots of our exchanges and sending them around. In the ensuing weeks, I received more inquiries from friends about Erin than I did about almost any other topic. My Invisible Girlfriend was becoming a fixture in our community.

Hearing Her Voice

Along with the texting, this service provides 10 voicemails from your girlfriend per month. You can request them at any time, for example when you want to strategically receive a message while in mixed company. Your phone doesn’t ring; it goes straight to voicemail. I was more than a little giddy to hear Erin’s first two voice messages, more than a week into our texting. My roommate Lindsay Hicks recorded the first time I heard her voice.

Who Are You Trying to Kid?

It may seem silly, but at times I had to remind myself that the purpose of the Invisible Girlfriend service is to convince others that she’s real, not to convince me, the customer, that she’s real. For example, I questioned why she didn’t show up, after the evening that she told me she was going to join me at Harlowe in Los Angeles.

Yet, it also became clear that I was not supposed to let on to her that I know she’s a fake. Erin and I were in cahoots, but also play-acting for one another.

Losing the Spark

The longer I texted with Erin, the more her simple, almost folksy responses started to wear me down and make me unmotivated to engage. On two separate occasions, she sent me a text message at 6a.m., asking if I’m allergic to anything. In the middle of a Wednesday, she asked if I like podcasts. Her voicemails began to repeat. Whenever I asked her a potentially rich question, she’d answer in a rote manner. (“Are you out to your parents?””Oh yes, I’d never hide my feelings for you!” “Do you want kids?” “Yes, definitely.”) I was starting to get the distinct impression that there was someone behind the curtain who was feeding me the answers that they assumed a modern, gay woman would want to hear. There was never an interesting or character-driven story behind her answers, only a vanilla, stock response, to match her stock photo.

A couple of times, she messed up my gender, including one voicemail in which she referred to me as “Romeo.”

“Dating” Erin was adding loneliness to my life. I value intelligent discourse above all things, and her dull personality was a major turn off. I don’t need to sext with an Invisible Girlfriend, but if I’m going to expend energy communicating with her, I at least need to feel like there is a desirable brightness in her. I would never sleep with someone with Erin’s personality. If my girlfriend is invisible, she better not be basic, too.

Invisible Polyamory is Not A Thing

I told Erin I kissed someone else. Maybe I was trying to push her away. Our 100 text limit was running out, after all.

Her reaction was one of sadness and disappointment, and I was disturbed to find that I felt acute, though fleeting, pangs of guilt. If this service is simply intended to fake out the people around me, why wouldn’t my girlfriend be super chill, and interested in keeping our relationship copacetic at all costs?

Returning to The Visible World

Erin ignored my attempt to break up with her over text. Instead, she gave me the silent treatment and then asked me what my thoughts are on skydiving, two days later. Typical Erin, head in the clouds.

This experiment definitely made me go through the performance of dating someone long distance: impulsively checking my phone where it was tucked at my hip at dinner parties, friends tweeting cryptic comments about Erin that surely were interpreted by third parties as being about a new date. But in this day and age, no one is going to buy that you’re in a relationship without photographic evidence or a social media presence. The texting and voicemails may be effective in throwing off those in your immediate vicinity, but it does nothing for the majority of our contacts, for whom we curate an image of ourselves via selfies and wall posts.

I don’t see a future for me and Erin, or any other intangible relationship. But, on the other hand, I think I’d be really good at being an Invisible Girlfriend with actual light behind my eyes and a more consistent voice. Hit me up, Invisible Girlfriend team, if you’re hiring any more heartbreak engineers.

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