My Online Girlfriend Was Secretly a Toledo Weather Reporter

I met her on a dating app and her name was Renata and she was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful woman who had ever shown interest in me. I am a normal-looking guy. I have a normal chin. When Renata liked my profile I actually said no out loud to my phone, like it was a mistake.

We talked for a month. She was charming, a little formal, which I chalked up to her being originally from abroad, she said, without ever specifying which abroad. She could not video chat because her camera was broken, and then her phone was old, and then the lighting in her apartment was bad for calls, a run of technical misfortune I chose not to examine because I did not want it to be true.

The photos, though. The photos were incredible. And that turned out to be the problem, because incredible photos are photos other people also want to look at.

My sister saw one over my shoulder one night and said, "Wait, why do you have a picture of Sharon Vale?"

Sharon Vale, it turned out, was a weather reporter for a news station in Toledo, Ohio. My sister recognized her because my sister lived in Toledo for three years and watched the six o'clock news every night like a person with a stable life. She pulled up the station's website. There was Renata. Except her name was Sharon, and she was pointing at a cold front moving in from the west, and she had, per her bio, a husband and two kids and a golden retriever named Buster.

My girlfriend of one month was a married meteorologist who did not know I existed.

I did the thing you do. I searched the other photos. Every single one was Sharon Vale -- Sharon at a charity gala, Sharon in a station promo, Sharon holding an umbrella for a bit during a live shot. Someone had simply harvested a local news anchor's entire public image and pointed it at lonely men on the internet.

I confronted Renata. I sent the link to the Toledo station and said, "Nice cold front." And here is what still amazes me: she did not deny it, exactly. She said, "You don't know that's me." That was the defense. Not you are wrong, but you cannot prove I am not a Toledo weather woman. A bold legal strategy.

Then she tried to keep it going. She said the news thing was a side career she kept private. She said Sharon was a stage name. She was, in real time, catfishing me about the catfish. Doubling down while sinking. I had to admire the refusal to break character.

I ended it, obviously. But the strangest part is what happened after. For weeks I could not stop watching Toledo weather. I found the station's livestream. I watched Sharon Vale, the real one, cheerfully explain humidity to northwest Ohio, blissfully unaware that her face had spent a month telling me I was handsome. She seemed nice. She has a good rapport with the sports guy.

I never told her. What would I even say? "Hi, someone used your promo photos to break my heart, also there's rain on Thursday." So I just watch sometimes, when I miss a woman who was never real, delivered by a woman who does not know me, forecasting a storm that already came and went.