When I first came to live with the fact that I was a Virgin adult and would remain so indefinitely, I went online to find others like me. Anyone in any given situation naturally wants to reach out to others in the same situation for guidance and support. I found a website that advertised having a support group for Virgins. This website and support group was run by a self-styled prophet who preached that Virginity was “the way of God” and that people should (this is an exact quote from the website) “eliminate the desire for sex and break free from the cycle of death and rebirth and find eternal youth and longevity.”

Anyhow…. this was the only Virgin support group that I could find, and this seemed to be the only website that had anything hopeful to say about adult Virginity.

It was a closed group, so I sent a request to join. Later, I received an email from the support group leader, webmaster, and self-professed Perpetual Virgin who I’ll call “Bill.” Bill and I ended up exchanging emails for a couple of weeks. I began to suspect that something was off because in all that time I had spoken only to him. This was supposed to be a support group. Where was the group? Whenever I asked Bill about the group or meeting other members, he changed the subject. I guessed that maybe Bill was the gatekeeper whose job it was to scrutinize every prospective new member to see if they were the right fit before admitting them. But I seriously began to wonder if there was a group at all, or if Bill made it up to lure Virgin women into a potential relationship with him. During the course of our chats he seemed to become possessive and got belligerent when I talked about the possibility of becoming sexually involved with another guy.  But after such a long time of feeling like I was the only Virgin on earth — I was so glad to had finally found someone else like me (or so I thought), I pushed aside any doubts that I had.

I began to open up to Bill and express things that I couldn’t express to anyone else in my life because they were not on my level. I trusted Bill and allowed myself to feel that I had this very deep connection with him because we were “the same”. Bill, on the other hand, was distant and stony. He strangely had nothing to say about himself or his life. I began to wonder why it was that I was doing all the talking. Several times I stopped and asked Bill to tell me something about his Virgin experiences, and each time he evaded the question.

Inevitably, the subject of sex came up. You can’t talk about abstinence without talking about sex since one cannot exist in this world without the other. It was then that Bill told me that he was, in his words, “NOT 100% pure” — and that he had engaged in manual intercourse where he had allowed a “girl” to give him a handjob. My spirit crashed. Bill was not a Virgin! Worse yet, he wasn’t even Chaste and obviously didn’t believe in Chastity since he also informed me that if a woman wanted to give him oral sex he “wouldn’t deny her that.”

So, all that time I had been bearing my soul to someone who had been deceiving me all along. To think that this fool had gone to the extreme of building a website where he preached from atop Mount Olympus that everyone should follow his example and remain as pure as falling snow if they wanted to know God! This guy had a significant number of followers. So he not only catfished me, he lied to and mislead thousands of people who subscribed to his website.  The fact that he finally told me the truth (at least, as much of it as he was willing to tell — he’d probably done a lot more than just have one woman jerk him off once) didn’t make it any easier to swallow.  As for the “Virgin support group” that he was supposed to be the leader of, it turned out that it was real; he introduced me to it shortly afterward. But it was quickly clear to me that its members were all a bunch of fakes just like him, so I left. By the way, this website and support group no longer exists.

The moral of this story is… just because someone says they’re a Virgin , it doesn’t mean that they are. There have always been people who have falsely claimed a Virgin identity to get attention, to please traditionalist parents, or to make themselves look more desirable to a potential spouse/lover. Although it’s never acceptable to lie to or deceive anyone, real Virgins who live very isolated lives surrounded by people who are not their peers are particularly vulnerable to those who would take advantage their loneliness and desperation. This has never been more truer it is in this current age of social networking. There’s a name for it: “Catfishing!”

Catfishing is the phenomenon where Internet scammers create fake online profiles, identities, and entire social circles to lure people into deceptive online romances.

Catfishing is the phenomenon where Internet scammers create fake online profiles, identities, and entire social circles to lure people into deceptive online romances. The Manti Ta’o fake girlfriend hoax which received a tsunami of media coverage last February brought the threat of Catfishing into public awareness. My experience was not as bad as Manti Ta’o’s, but it was traumatic enough to make me change the way that I interact with everyone I meet online who claims to be a Virgin. What happened to me was a learning experience. Who knows, maybe it was meant to happen just so I could share what I’ve learned from it with you through this blog. In my next post, I will be giving tips and advice on how you out there in the Virgin community may avoid being baited by catfish that are lurking on websites and social media pages about Virginity.