Dude or Chick: or how to tell if your online girlfriend is a guy

You've all heard the story, guy meets girl on the internet. She's funny, smart, interested in the same things you are, and when she sends you a picture of herself, she's pretty smoking hot. And then you find out--it's a man, baby! (You have to hear that in an Austin Powers voice).

Not only is this sad b/c you really liked this girl, but if your guy friends found out about what happened, you know they're going to bring it up forever. On your wedding day, your asshole best friend is going to talk about that in his toast or something. So how can this tragedy be avoided?

First, like all deals, if she sounds too good to be true, she probably is. (Unless this online girl is like me or Felicia Day, although I'm not saying I'm as awesome as Felicia Day b/c I'm unlikely to do MMORPG based 80s style pop videos sorry, got distracted, had to watch like three videos of Felicia Day singing. Where was I?) Oh, if you meet a hot elf chick and she's perfect and she's more awesome than all your best guy friends and you have everything in common and she's hot IRL too, then you have to start wondering what are the odds of that happening? It's not impossible but you should make sure she's a girl before you start texting her pictures of your junk.

Is this similar to what your online girlfriend looks like? B/c girls this pretty generally don't live on the internet. They're off being hot and popular-like.

Second, if she never wants to talk to you on the phone or meet IRL and you've been online dating for a while. I'm not talking about you met last week and now you're in love but you've known each other for a while and you think it could be really serious, things generally start moving from online to the real world. But instead of calling, she always insists you text or she can't call b/c she doesn't have long distance (who doesn't have long distance nowadays? it's not like 10 years ago when I was in college and no one had cell phones!) Not wanting to meet IRL is a bit different. There are a lot reasons why a girl might not want to hurry and meet random people from the internet. There are a lot of girls who've gone to meet some guy and not come back so it's actually ok if she's cautious. But if it's gone on a long time and you guys live locally, meeting in a neutral location is possible. Bookstores and cafes are common meeting spots. Basically if you two are pretty serious and you haven't had any confirmation that she's a real person and not just pictures someone downloaded from a J-pop site, then start to wonder.

Third, there are discrepancies in things she tells you. Facts and names of people are changed, dates change, she's told you about ten majors she's had, things like that. If she's dishonest in one aspect, what else could she be lying out? While not being a liar doesn't automatically make her a dude, if it's in conjunction with a lot of other warning signs, start seriously thinking about it. Of course dating a liar in general is bad, even hot women liars.

And if you think this stuff doesn't happen, my brother's friend in high school used to pretend to be a girl online and would send guys a picture of a really cute Japanese girl and say it was him. Why? B/c he's weird, that's why. Some dudes are just jerks. That was 15 years ago in the infancy of the internet, and now we've had 15 more years for weirdos to perfect their art, so yeah, don't get scammed. Make sure your online girlfriend is indeed a girl. Oh, but like if you do meet her in real life, you are NOT allowed to like grab her crotch to double check, NOT COOL.