Signs Your Online Relationship Will Never Enter The Real World

You’ve been talking to someone online for a while now and the conversation is effortless. It’s different to all your other online conversations, which are mostly dick pics and sexual innuendo, and it feels nice to talk to someone human for once. Before you get too invested, take a step back and pay attention to these warning signs that your relationship is stuck in the digital world and will never enter the real one.

  1. If they ask you on a date at all, it’s always at some vague time in the future. While it seems counterintuitive that someone who has no intention of meeting you in real life would actually ask you out, don’t get too excited. The sad reality is that a lot of people will ask you to hang out “soon” but fail to ever make actual plans for it to happen.
  2. They’re always “too busy” to follow through. Everybody’s busy, but their life is so mad 24/7 that they can’t possibly take a few hours out of their schedule to hang out with you despite the fact that they’re happy to chat to you for hours online. If you’ve actually agreed on a day and time for your date, something will magically come up every single time and they’ll reschedule, only for the same thing to happen the next time. Not worth it!
  3. They tell you they’re no longer using whatever dating platform you initially met on. You moved your convo from the dating app you met on to GChat, text, or some other platform, which seems like a good sign but could be the opposite. If they tell you that they’ve left Tinder/Bumble/OkCupid/whatever and then you log on to not only find their profile still there but a green ‘active’ dot next to their username, they’re lying and you need to get rid of them immediately. While you’re hopefully not exclusive yet since you haven’t actually met in person, why lie and tell you they’re not looking elsewhere if they are?
  4. You find out they were in your neighborhood but didn’t tell you or ask you to hang. Whether it was for a job interview or a social engagement, your chat buddy has been in your neighborhood at least once and potentially lots of times… and yet they’ve never asked you to hang. Even worse, they didn’t even mention that they were around—you found out via a Facebook check-in or an Instagram pic. Wow.
  5. They have you right where they want you: you’re more into them than they are into you. Why is it whenever you’re not interested in someone, they’re interested in you and when you finally do show interest, they run for the hills? When you first started chatting, you were feeling pretty casual about the whole thing. However, the longer you “knew” one another, the more invested you became. Now you’re the one asking all the questions about their life and there doesn’t seem to be much reciprocation on their end.
  6. They don’t seem as bothered about the fact that you’ve never met as you are. They can’t fathom why not meeting them makes you feel like an idiot for investing time into sending messages to someone you’ve never met and probably won’t anytime soon. They don’t really think it’s a big deal and don’t get why you’re so frustrated with the situation, and that’s because they don’t ever plan on meeting you anyway.
  7. They start to communicate less and less. At first you talked every day, and it quickly became a staple in your daily routine to receive a witty message from them that totally brightened your day. However, as you start asking more about hanging out in person and expressing disappointment that it hasn’t happened already, they start to disappear little by little…
  8. They’ve added more photos to their dating profile. It’s been a while since you’ve been on their dating profile but you pull it up to have a look again when you’re feeling nostalgic and want to remember what your early conversations were like. Now there are more photos there you hadn’t seen before and their bio has even been updated. Who are they trying to impress? Certainly not you.
  9. They don’t care when you threaten to end things. You tell them you feel like it’s a waste of time to talk to someone who doesn’t seem to care about meeting you and they don’t particularly fight to keep you in their life or make a move to rectify the situation. That’s because it was never going to be anything real anyway and they’ll just move onto the next person. The most baffling thing is figuring out why this happens in the first place. Why bother? Is it the flattery of having someone to talk to who wants to meet up with you? Is it boredom? Is it a backup plan in case it doesn’t go well with someone else? The truth is, you’ll never know—you just need to move on.
Bolde has been a source of dating and relationship advice for single women around the world since 2014. We combine scientific data, experiential wisdom, and personal anecdotes to provide help and encouragement to those frustrated by the journey to find love. Follow us on Instagram @bolde_media or on Facebook @BoldeMedia
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