S1E12 Stephanie and David: Look At Me, I'm Miserable
On falling in love with your own brokenness (with a little bit of astrology and Princess Di thrown in).
If we are honest with ourselves we will acknowledge that the chief pleasure of the correspondence lies in its responsive aspect rather than its receptive one. It is with our own epistolary persona that we fall in love, rather than with that of our pen pal; what makes the arrival of a letter a momentous event is the occasion it affords for writing rather than reading.
—Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer
I have to start this week’s newsletter with a confession: my brain is straight up not working anymore. I sort of muddle through work and do okay, and then the second I’m off the clock I turn into some kind of ogre made of Silly Putty. At the time of writing I haven’t left the house in four days, mostly because I don’t really know what I would do out there. I’m deep in the pandemic fog, and that means all my little creative exercises (like this one) have gotten harder. If you’re in the same boat but you’ve for some reason figured out how to deal with it, can you please help? Just don’t say “go for a walk.”
I used to be better about maintaining my relationships. Earlier in the pandemic my sister sent me a care package that included notes from well, most of you, my pals! And in her note Caroline wrote: “Remember when we used to write each other letters in college as if the other were a soldier at war?”
Friends, that is absolutely what I did. I was always sending these flowery, pretentious missives that included French phrases and descriptions of the weather in Ann Arbor, and the sort of relentless drumbeat subtext of it all was I am sad I am bored I am lonely if I have to go to another football game or Chi Phi party I am going to throw in the towel and just finish my degree from the psych ward. And I liked college! But, as Janet Malcolm writes above, I was completely in love with who I became in those letters, in love with my own disappointments and resentments, and thrilled to pick them apart ad nauseam because I knew that Caroline would read it. (That’s the sort of romantic charge of confiding in someone, especially in writing.) I was, without exactly lying, assigning conflict for the character of myself to face on her hero’s journey.
“Stephanie and David” is an episode about self-absorption, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. If you’re dealing with a difficult situation, it makes perfect sense to be self-absorbed. But it makes plain an issue that appears in subtler ways in other episodes which is: sometimes when we want someone to talk to, what we really want is just permission to talk.
The Episode
Max and Nev are contacted by Stephanie, a young woman in the Los Angeles area who has been talking to a guy named David for the past seven months. I don’t know if Stephanie is a Scorpio, but look, Stephanie is a Scorpio. She comfortably discloses that she has trust issues and that it takes a lot for her to believe that men have good intentions, especially since undergoing the trauma of her parents’ recent divorce. David, who has been a caring friend and constant confidant throughout this experience, may be able to change all that, but she has to meet him first.
When they boys arrive in California and gather around Stephanie’s kitchen table, she casually mentions that almost exactly like Zooey Deschanel’s character in (500) Days of Summer, the divorce has led her to realize that she doesn’t actually believe in love. (You can see a bunch of little cartoon springs and gears fall out of Nev’s head when he hears this. He’s like wwwwwwwhat?) But it’s because Stephanie’s dad cheated on her mom after 42 years of marriage, and if her dad could do something like that, what’s to stop some guy off the street (or Facebook) from doing the same to her, with impunity? And honestly, Scorpio to Scorpio, I think she’s right! TRUST NO ONE!
But it’s grand statements like this that allow Max and Nev to feel like they are not merely MTV reality show hosts, but men with a mission (they’re America’s matchmakers, sort of like how Dr. Oz is America’s physician) and so they become instantly invested in locating David and melting Stephanie’s ice cold heart. Because they’re in LA, they do their investigation from Nev’s bachelor pad, where he has not bothered to close the doors to his laundry room or remove any of his humiliating art from the walls, and the first thing they find is that David’s profile contains basically no information. He has 63 friends, no bio, and minimal photos. The first reverse image search yields a hit on a blog called Yummy Black Boys, and the person in the photos is revealed to be a guy named Cayron who lives in New Jersey. Not good. Bypassing much of the usual hemming and hawing, Nev calls David and asks him if he would like to meet Stephanie, please, and David is like “she lives pretty far from my house, idk,” and when they hang up Max, ever deadpan, says “I can see why she likes him so much.” David, who initially said he thought he could find time to meet up in the next couple of days, bails via text immediately.
They find Stephanie at a nail salon with her friends Barbie and Sonja and tell her the news, which is essentially, no news. “I’ve been talking to a stranger,” she says, which is indisputable, and so it just hangs in the air as the foot bath burbles. But Nev works his particular brand of magic (facile romantic pleas, an MTV stipend, I’m sure) and David agrees to meet with them the following day.
When they arrive, he is not David, but Dawaun. He is not the man from the photos. He also does not work at the Staples Center, as he’d claimed, but at a movie theater. He seems incredibly nervous, and rightfully so, because when his lies are revealed, Stephanie announces that he disgusts her. There is a kind of triumphant tone to Stephanie’s fury, like she is relieved that the world is actually as bad as she thinks it is. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until she has Max and Nev stop at a church on the way back so that she can light a candle, and I was like, ohhhh, she’s Catholic.
Max and Nev seem to decide amongst themselves that Stephanie needs a reality check. She had been talking to David/Dawaun for seven months, all about her pain and anger and the vile process of realizing that your parents are just as flawed and traumatized as you are, and she never really stopped to think about who he was. Basically all she knew about the guy was that he worked at the Staples Center.
Nev: You knew there was something off, but you went along with it…
Stephanie: Like an idiot.
Nev: Not like an idiot, like someone who needed a friend.
Dawaun’s deal is that he created the fake profile solely to spy on his ex who had blocked him, so he didn’t really devote any time to making it look authentic. He found Stephanie through said ex’s page, and he messaged her on a whim, not necessarily expecting to find someone who was so primed for online companionship. He seems very embarrassed by the whole thing, but he does really care about Stephanie. Max urges Stephanie to find out more about Dawaun. “You needed someone so much you barely asked anything about him for seven months,” he tells her, in a nice way. “Maybe give him a hug before you leave.”
Stephanie realizes that she has been selfish, but that doesn’t stop her from cutting ties from Dawaun entirely after filming wraps. After all, it was never really about him, was it?
Has anyone else forgotten how to be a normal person?
Imagine that you are Dawaun, using your dummy Facebook profile to keep tabs on your ex (not okay, by the way, Dawaun!) when suddenly you come across the account of a cute girl named Stephanie, so you say hi, and what you find is that she is Having A Really Hard Time Right Now and you two fall into this desperate romantic correspondence.
One is not really supposed to say this, but I think there can be something exciting about being in a tremendous amount of emotional pain. I want to be clear: Stephanie’s experience with her parents’ divorce sounds awful, and still very raw at the time of filming. What I mean is that when you are hurting like that, it is all-consuming. It is exciting like stumbling across, well, a bad family secret. You wish you weren’t there, but you are, so you might as well keep digging, and anyone who comes across your path better be ready to grab a shovel, too.
I recently heard a story about Princess Diana that I think about sometimes: she and *gags* Charles were at some event during the height of her eating disorder, and suddenly she felt like she was going to faint, so she grabbed his shoulder and said “Darling, I think I’m about to disappear.” I’m not one of those Diana people (but she was, by the way, also a water sign) and I bring this up just to say that that particular phrase - Darling, I think I’m about to disappear - rattles around in my head when I think about what happens to a person when they are deeply depressed and/or chronically ignored. Saying “I think I’m about to disappear” when what you really mean is “I think I’m about to pass out” is so literary, so dramatic. It’s not unlike saying “I don’t believe in love” when what you mean is “I’ve seen good relationships go horribly wrong, and that scares me.” You feel the need to put things in drastic terms because they feel drastic.
In other words, in fewer words: GOING THROUGH BAD SHIT MAKES YOU FORGET HOW TO BE A NORMAL PERSON. Maybe you enter into a pretty one-sided online relationship. Maybe you start talking like a character in a movie, or writing letters like a war widow. Every few-and-far-between time I’ve seen a friend during this neverending pandemic has made me feel like I’ve utterly forgotten how to be. I can’t shut up, or I forget to say things altogether. I even move differently. I think that if Max and Nev were to show up at my door tomorrow I would come across as either very cold and weird, like Stephanie, or maybe as upbeat and delusional, like previous hopefuls we’ve seen this season (Rico!!!). That’s something I’ve really only been able to understand in this pandemic rewatch, actually. I identify with the people on Catfish not because I think I am necessarily socially inept but because now I understand that maybe nobody is necessarily that way. You become that way, over time. You are not lonely because you are weird. It’s just that loneliness has made you somewhat strange.
Catfish Newsdesk: Romance scams hit an all-time high in 2020
I wasn’t sure where to put this because it doesn’t apply to “Stephanie and David,” but it felt so relevant to everything I’m interested in that I couldn’t not talk about it: the Federal Trade Commission reported in February that reported losses to romance scams hit a record $304 million dollars, with a median loss of $2,500 per person. And look:
“Reports of money lost on romance scams increased for every age group in 2020. People ages 20 to 29 saw the most striking increase, with the number of reports more than doubling since 2019. People ages 40 to 69 were once again the most likely to report losing money to romance scams.7 And people 70 and older reported the highest individual median losses at $9,475.”
The article attributes the 50% increase in money lost to romance scammers from 2019 to two factors: one, obviously, is the pandemic (a real boon to catfish looking for an excuse not to meet in person, I’d say) but the other is that the share of people using online dating sites or apps is rising, as I’ve mentioned here before.
Thankfully, none of us are in danger. We know how to reverse image search.
On that depressing note, I’ll wrap this up, and be back next time to talk about the CATFISH SEASON 1 REUNION SHOW. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.
XOXO,
Hannah
LOGGED OFF, or what I’m doing when I’m not watching Catfish
Reading: this excellent piece titled Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny
Watching: The Grammys, but I’m mad about it
Excited for: MY UPCOMING MOVE, which will absolutely, 100% be my last