It is not unusual to get catfished when online dating.

There are a number of people who will misrepresent themselves online for various reasons.

If you got catfished, you should try not to take it personally.

Again, getting catfished is something that happens online to quite a few people.

Your best recourse is to take some lessons out of this experience so that you do better in avoiding people like this in the future.

An effective way to help avoid getting catfished is to make sure that you don’t spend too much time interacting with a person that you meet on an online dating site before asking them to meet up with you in person.

A mistake that people often make when they are online dating is when they interact with someone for too long.

In doing this, you could play right into the hands of someone who is catfishing you.

For most people who are catfishing you, the longer that they are able to string you along online, the better.

It allows them to continue living the lie that they are who they are claiming to be.

If you were to request a meet up after a sufficient number of correspondences with this person, you will put yourself in a much better place as far as protecting your effort and your time.

If this is a person who has been catfishing you, you will notice that they will be reluctant to meet up in person.

They may try to avoid the question altogether by bringing up another topic of conversation.

They may tell you that they would love to meet up but that there is some personal emergency that they are attending to, perhaps with a family member or friend.

They may tell you that their schedule is really full at this time but they will hopefully be more free in the near future.

They may even actually agree to meet up with you at first.

However, as the day of the date gets closer, they may contact you and cancel because of a sudden unexpected emergency or incident.

If the person being catfished is lucky, the first request to meet up will often scare the catfish and they may completely disappear from the picture.

A request to meet up is their cue that the game is up and it is time to move on to the next victim.

However, sometimes people aren’t so lucky.

They may be really naive.

The catfish may have charmed them to the point where they are willing to accept any excuse that is given to them.

Hence, if the catfish were to tell them that they can’t make the date at this time for whatever reason but that they should be able to in the near future, the person sticks around and is hopeful that this meeting will happen.

Unfortunately, by sticking around, they merely continue playing into the hands of the catfish, allowing themselves to become more and more emotionally invested in the catfish.

This gives the catfish a lot of control over the interaction allowing them to stretch it out without ever meeting the person for months, if not years.

This is never a position that you should allow yourself to be in.

With consistent communication, you shouldn’t allow any more than two weeks of correspondence to occur without asking to meet up with someone that you met on an online dating site.

This protects your time and effort and also prevents you from falling prey to a catfish.

If the person isn’t willing to meet, take that as a bad sign and discontinue communication with them.