I made a fake account… 

Before I start this piece I want to set the context for it; I was in an all girls school and the guys I liked I barely saw and I couldn’t exactly add them on Facebook with my own account since that would look incredibly desperate and even 13 year old me had some self-respect.

So, what was I supposed to do but make a fake account on Facebook?

The first and only apology I want to make is to the unsuspecting women whose images I lifted from a Google image search of ‘young Pakistani college girl’. However, I will not apologize to the men who believed I was a real person. All the profile pictures were of different women, if you believed I was a real person, that’s a little bit on you, tbh.

Okay fine! I realize that it was not cool to play with peoples’ feelings and whatever I did, I now realize was pretty wrong. I was exactly the stranger your parents warned you about finding the internet. So, let this piece be a cautionary tale about how you should not add those you don’t know on social media.

What did I get up to with my fake account on Facebook? I added every single guy I had even a little bit of a crush on.

My cousin’s friends I saw at a wedding, the cute guy at an inter-school competition, the hot neighbor; you name him and he was probably in my friend list!

And guess what? THEY ALL ADDED ME BACK. Except one, I suppose he was the one who got away.

Anyway, I would have long conversations with each and every one of them. I pretended to be an A’Levels student from LGS Defence because I heard they were the most popular girls and all the boys liked them. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?!

I remember, one guy who I had a massive crush on asked me where I knew him from. ‘Oh from our AS Level exams, I saw you and thought you were cute’ I said, and he replied back with ‘got you, LGS Defence ka exam center was different from ours. Tum fake account ho!‘. He figured it out. What other choice did I have but to block him immediately?

I concocted entire lives for the women each of these men talked to. Each tailor-made to cater to appeal to the guy I was talking to.

The fact that I did this when I was just 14 blows my mind… is it a surprise that I’m in therapy now?

Anyway, I kept this up for almost a year. One of the men was told a story of how I was stuck in an abusive home and needed to be rescued. I was under the impression that men loved playing the knight in shining armor and honestly, I wasn’t exactly too off the mark. When I saw that presenting myself as a ‘sad and fragile’ girl who needed to be saved really appealed to these guys, I made similar stories for all of them.

Looking back I realize how wrong I was to do this; I made these men invested in my persona and then told them disturbing things that she was going through in an effort to worry them and at this point in my life I am hoping no one took the things I said seriously. While it was meant to be harmless, it really wasn’t.

Considering I was in an all girls school, this was the most exciting thing that was happening to me or anyone around me.

Sure enough, I told all my friends about it. And soon enough, everyone was asking me for the login details so they could borrow the account and add and talk to their crushes as well.

Another friend took it a step further and made her own fake account which was to be best friends with my fake account. IT WENT DEEP, Y’ALL. We would tag each other in friendship quotes and write on each other’s walls. Anything to make ourselves seem more legit. Okay, SERIOUSLY WHERE WERE OUR PARENTS?!

In almost no time at all, every time I would log in to the account, the inbox would be inundated with messages and I could read through dozens of conversations friends had had with their crushes. Mind you, these were the ‘it boys’ of Lahore at the time. All Aitchisonians and JT Boys, older than us. In A’levels while we were in the 9th grade, lost in what we thought was their ‘maturity’.

I used the account for almost a year. Talked to every single guy I liked till the magic wore off and I realized he was just another horny teenager and not the ‘mature’ man I thought he was.

Can you blame them? I was talking to 17-year-old boys and expecting them to have the maturity and dry wit possessed only by male characters in Jane Austen’s novels. Expecting them to have maturity and be honest with me, when I myself was pretending to be someone I was not… talk about hypocrisy.

But with time, the account was finally put to rest when I was almost about to be caught because of certain careless friends. And now that I think about it, I am glad I stopped it when I did, even though at the time I was upset about the account dying a premature death. It had a good run. And I don’t exactly regret it. Or maybe I do. I’ll save that realization for therapy.

Have you ever encountered a fake account on Facebook? Tell us the story in the comment section below.

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Cover Image Source: thequint.com