As a victim of fraudulent online dating himself, Nev Schulman knows what happens when using modern technology to find love goes wrong.
At 23, Schulman connected with a woman online. The two exchanged flirty texts for months, then he traveled cross-country to meet her. What he came to find was that he'd actually been communicating with a middle-aged woman who had been masquerading behind pictures she'd lifted from a model. His experiences were chronicled in the documentary "Catfish," which turned into an MTV series that connects two individuals communicating online. It also spawned the term "catfish," which denotes the premise of being deceived via online dating.
"I think any of the dating apps are fine, or dating websites," he told HuffPost Live's Josh Zepps in an interview on Friday. "It's just making sure you set a really strict and realistic guideline or parameter for how long you'll communicate with someone before you meet them."
He recommends keeping the amount of texting time short so as to avoid projecting onto the individual you're corresponding with.
"If you're serious about dating, the intention is to meet in person and feel the chemistry, hopefully, of being with someone, but if you go past ... two weeks or a month of talking and chit-chat, or even three days depending on how aggressive you want to be, then you can start to feel things for someone," he explained.
Find out more about Nev Schulman and the "catfishing" phenomenon in his newly released memoir "In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age."
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