The perfectly passable 1998 film You’ve Got Mail was perhaps the first nugget of pop culture to address the excitement, risk, and misplaced longing of online dating. Twenty years after that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan vehicle, we’re set for a massive update to that cinematic genre.
Well, we will be, if Hollywood screenwriters adapt today’s heart-busting feature in The Atlantic. And they should.
In a piece that legitimately demands you sit down with a cuppa, journo Jeff Maysh recounts the story of Emma Perrier, the French restaurant worker whose sincere search for love led her to dating app Zoosk, and wildly handsome Italian Ronaldo “Ronnie” Scicluna.
The two bonded over messages. Despite his reluctance to meet in person, they eventually fell for each other. “Unlike her ex-boyfriend, Ronnie seemed mature and attentive,” Maysh writes. “Ronnie was easy on the eyes, funny, and caring, but there was one problem: He did not exist.”
Yep. The seemingly perfect Ronnie was actually Alan Stanley, a 53-year-old shop-fitter who nicked some model’s image off the internet and used it as a disguise on dating apps. The story could have ended with a lovesick and frustrated Perrier using a reverse-image search to learn the truth, but Maysh’s practical interrogation of Stanley lends the whole saga a new level:
“It was eating at me because I knew the longer it went on, the more problematic it would become in the long term,” he said. Like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Alan had donned a ludicrous disguise to win the affections of his Olivia. And in a world where Alan felt ugly and invisible to the opposite sex, Emma showered him in “adoration.” In his mind, Alan minimized his lie: “Everything I told her about me, apart from who I was, and the age, was true.”
Their relationship (there’s no single word in the English language to describe the fractious acquaintance between two people who only know each other through a fraudulent identity) carried on, with one world-shattering addition: Perrier had identified the model in the photos, and shot him a message. And he replied.
Stunningly, when Perrier figured out what had happened, she didn’t just nope out of the situation. Instead, she met with Stanley in an attempt to understand exactly why he’d catfished her to such an extraordinary degree. Regarding the model, Alan said “I just put two and two together.
“I reckoned that they are talking behind the scenes.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. Perrier had identified the fella as Turkish model Adem Güzel, and had started her own deep correspondence with the bloke. That lead to a meeting in London. That lead to a surprise kiss. That lead to them falling in love, and starting an entirely new life together.
Again, we must utterly implore you to devour the entire piece, because that lil’ recap simply doesn’t do this one justice. It is a love story (several love stories, really), a character study, and a musing on the nature of online relationships and how they’ve gone ahead and fucked up our entire understanding of connection and intimacy.
And we must reiterate that it will absolutely become a massive rom-com hit. So, before it hit screens, check it out HERE.
