I Was Just a Row in the Catfish's Spreadsheet

I found out I was one of many because of a shared calendar, which is not how anyone wants to learn anything.

His name, allegedly, was Alec. We met on an app. Great profile -- rock climbing, a rescue dog, a job in renewable energy that he described just vaguely enough to sound impressive and just specifically enough to sound real. We matched, we clicked, we talked every day for about three weeks. He was attentive in a way that felt almost professional, and it turns out that is because it was.

The pictures were of a real, attractive man doing real attractive-man things. The dog was cute. The problem, which I discovered slowly, was that none of it belonged to the person texting me.

The first crack was small. He mentioned a restaurant we had talked about loving that we had never discussed. I let it slide -- everyone mixes up threads. Then he wished me luck on the big presentation Monday. I do not give presentations. I am a dental hygienist. I have never presented anything. When I said so, he smoothed it over instantly -- "sorry, brain fog, long week" -- but a little alarm had started ringing in the back of my skull.

So before our planned first date, I did some digging. I reverse-searched his photos. They belonged to a personal trainer in Vancouver with a public, verified, very much unaware-of-me existence. The dog was the trainer's dog. The renewable energy job did not exist. Alec was a face borrowed from a Canadian man who bench presses for a living.

But here is the part that made my skin crawl. In one of the photos he had sent me directly -- not from a profile, a candid one, supposedly of his desk -- there was a laptop open in the background, and on the screen, just barely legible, was a spreadsheet. A grid of names. First names, dates, little notes. And near the top, misspelled, was mine.

He was running a list. I was a row. The brain fog was him losing track of which woman had which fake life. The attentiveness was a script applied at scale. Somewhere there was a column for me, with notes, so he could remember that I was the hygienist and not the one with the Monday presentation.

I did not confront him. I know that is what everyone says, but with this one I was genuinely a little scared -- something about the spreadsheet, the calm industrial patience of it, made me not want to poke the machine. Instead I just stopped responding. I ghosted the ghost. I removed myself from the grid without a word.

And the truly unsettling thing? He did not chase. Most guys, real or fake, send at least one hey, you okay. Not Alec. I went silent and he went silent back within a day, cleanly, without friction, the way you close a browser tab. I had simply been marked inactive. Deprioritized. He had, I imagine, plenty of other rows.

I reported the profile. I even tried to warn the poor personal trainer in Vancouver through his public page, though I have no idea if the message reached him past the wall of comments about protein. And then I did the only sane thing, which was to take a long break from the apps and rediscover the ancient art of meeting no one.

Sometimes I think about that spreadsheet. All those names. All those women getting good-morning texts from a man who did not exist, each of us a tidy little row in someone else's cold, patient project. I hope the others got out too. I hope the trainer's dog is doing well. It really was a cute dog.