There’s no denying the effects that the internet has had on relationships. Not just romantic ones either, but platonic and familial, too. It added so many new and different ways to interact, we all had to adapt to it as it was happening.
These new forms of interaction don’t always manifest too well, though. There’s one man who knows this first hand, as he had to experience learning that a girl he believed to be dating online was actually his father in disguise.
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Catfishing is a phenomenon that’s only grown more common as the internet and social media becomes a bigger part of our lives.
If you don’t know, to catfish someone is to create a fake identity online and pretend to be someone you’re not. This often includes the use of stolen photos, a fake name, an entire fake life. It happens to tons of people around the world every day, but some cases are much stranger than others.
James Morosini is a Hollywood actor and director.
He’s appeared in HBO’s The Sex Lives of College Girls and American Horror Story, and when he was 20, a young woman named Becca reached out to him via Facebook message.
The two grew very close very quickly.
They would talk every day about their myriad of shared interests, and before long, they made their relationship official.
It wasn’t until a while later that Morosini discovered the truth. Becca wasn’t real, and was in fact a fake profile made by his father in an attempt to reconnect with his estranged son.
It was most certainly a shocking moment, one that many people would not have taken well.
However, Morosini seems to be making the most of it by turning the experience into a film.
Called I Love My Dad , the movie had its premiere at the SXSW Film Festival this month, and even won the 2022 Narrative Feature Competition Grand Jury Award. He told The Daily Beast , “I took the kernel of what actually happened and extrapolated upon that, and used my imagination to push it to the furthest degree of, ‘What if it had gone even further in this direction?’”
The movie itself definitely pushes more moral envelopes.
Thankfully, his real-world experience wasn’t quite as extreme, and he says it actually brought he and his father together.
“It was us hitting that rock bottom in our relationship, but it forced us to confront some of the foundational problems of our relationship and actually caused things between him and I to get a lot better over time, because we had to talk about it,” he said, adding that they have a ‘great relationship’ today.
h/t: LADbible
