A mother who was catfished 25 times in one year through an online dating app has spoken of her unfavourable dating experiences in a new book.
Samantha Thorne, 42, from Dartford, Kent, joined Plenty of Fish after her second divorce but soon realised that many of her matches weren’t who they appeared to be on their profiles.
The beautician went for a drink with a guy whose photos were so massively altered she didn’t realise she’d previously dated him in the past and stumbled across one profile using a male model’s images.
After a year of online disasters, the mother of two met her current partner David Tyson, 55, during the lockdown, and turned her old dating diary into a book about internet dating.
Speaking of joining the app, Samantha Thorne said that she decided she’d give it a go because she was looking at seriously finding someone to settle down with.
She said that when she initially started, she presumed everyone would be who they said they were, but the more people she chatted to, the more she discovered people were not always who they said they were.
She continued that it was a strange time in her life, and it was enjoyable at times, but that you definitely needed a thick skin, but she’s got her happy ending now with her new man, so she won’t be using dating websites again.
The bizarre year of internet dating started after Samantha Thorne’s second marriage came to an end in 2017, with the mother eager to find a new partner online.
Samantha, who has a son Owen, 17, and daughter Daisy, 15, was immediately overwhelmed with messages, but quickly realised many people weren’t who they seemed to be online.
She said one of her most memorable truth-bending experiences was meeting up with an undercover swinger, and after a surprisingly great first date for drinks in a local pub, where he seemed normal, kind and interesting, she was charged for their second date.
But things took a bizarre turn when he proposed they visited a sex club for swingers to swap partners with other members, and Samantha said that when he said there was somewhere he wanted to take her, she envisioned a nice restaurant but he told her he wanted to get other people involved.
Sadly, online dating has both the youngest and oldest looking thirty-five-year olds I’ve ever seen, whether it’s men using images of themselves from 2008 when they still had their hair and six-pack, or men in their fifties pretending to be younger so they can circumvent the age filters.
And it’s not only dating sites, there’s loads of false everything – push up bras et cetera, and that’s just the boys, so what’s changed? And the women are just as bad as the men with their false hair, false lashes, false eyebrows, false cheeks, false boobs, false tummies and false bums et cetera, and then they dare to complain they can’t get a genuine guy, but then this is Plenty of Fish we’re talking about, the most sham site there is.
