Lots of children have imaginary invisible friends to comfort and relate to  when they’re sad. Thanks to modern technology, you can go one step further towards total delusion as an adult and have an invisible boyfriend or girlfriend. Unlike the childhood imaginary friend of which there is no substantial evidence of their existence, your invisible partner will send you text messages and voicemail, at a fee of $24.99 USD a month.
Why would you pay to be sent texts from a fake partner? Some reasons listed on the website include shaking off co-workers and relatives who want to interfere in your love life, making an ex jealous, to not be the only singleton in your group of friends or to hide your true sexuality. Is it just me, or are each of these reasons ridiculous? I can totally understand how these situations would leave you wishing you had a partner or were able to pretend you had one, but paying money for a few messages here and there doesn’t seem like the best approach, in my opinion.
Firstly, I don’t know of anybody in a real relationship that goes showing their texts from their boyfriend around or publicly listening to their voicemail – that alone would make me suspicious. Whilst the website suggests that you could claim it’s a long distance relationship, if my friend was telling me about their wonderful partner then I’d want to know all the details, including when I’d get to meet them and if they had a Facebook account that I could have a nosy at. If they were awkward about telling me those things then I’d start to question our friendship, not only the legitimacy of their relationship. Once you start having to set up fake profiles for them, it all becomes far too elaborate a scheme and potentially illegal.
Secondly, what happened to the days of simply stating that you’re seeing somebody but it’s early days and you don’t want to jinx things by saying too much yet? Or even the mind-blowingly insane solution of telling people that you haven’t found the right person that you want to date yet, not that it’s any of their business.
However, my real issue here is not with the Invisible Boyfriend/Girlfriend app, which is only a symptom of a much larger root cause.
It saddens me that it’s 2015 and people are still feeling ashamed for being single and this is something that is constantly being reinforced within society. As a person who loves to travel and try out new experiences, it really irks me that a lot of deals are based around two people doing things together and often in a romantic context. Although I’m currently in a relationship, why can I not choose to do fun things alone? Oh, because single people don’t benefit capitalism as much – they can live cheaply and work less hours because they may not have people depending on them. I’ve also encountered people who genuinely can’t fathom how people can survive without somebody to hold their hand and think of it as something worthy of derision, rather than a personal strength.
The current prices in the housing and rental markets make it nigh on impossible for the average person to ever move out of their family home without a partner to help financially support them. If they should manage to do so alone, people may then question their motives for living alone – perhaps they’re childish, a hermit, friendless? All signs seem to point to us being socially and economically coerced into marriage and having children, with the constant threat of a lifetime of isolation and prejudice hanging over our heads.
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