Look, we’ve all fallen for people we’ve “met” online. Some far away stranger who can turn a phrase in a way that makes the loins tingle. Someone who takes beautiful, captivating photographs. Someone who shares just the right amount of their lives online so that it baits you into biting the hook, desperate to know more. Someone who does all of these things. It happens. All the time. It’s the world we now live in.
But there is no love — NO LOVE — in Mafia Wars. I thought everyone knew this. It seems so self-evident. If you want to find love outside of dating websites, you go to Facebook itself or on Tumblr or the comments section of your favorite blog. BUT YOU DO NOT GO LOOKING FOR LOVE IN MAFIA WARS. Or else. So consider this a cautionary tale.
The trouble started when 50-year-old unemployed paralegal Cheryl Gray met Wylie Iwan (That’s part of the problem right there…never trust a man named “Wylie,” ladies) online. According to Gray’s lawsuit against Iwan, he “led her on, caused her to spend money on gifts and a trip,” which he later forced her to cancel because he claimed he fell for another woman he’d met in a bar, and then “humiliated her when he posted vulgar comments on her Facebook wall.”
Reports the Seattle Times:
Gray, a single mother living in Livonia, Mich., with her 13-year-old daughter, said she played Mafia Wars on Facebook and met Iwan through the game because they were part of the same clan, or family.
They became Facebook friends in September and had about 300 friends in common, she said. During the next couple of months, they began talking through Facebook messages, and Gray said Iwan wanted to exchange personal information and get to know her.
They also talked on the phone, through text messages and via email, she said.
By late November or early December, Iwan created a special group page and invited her to join it, she said. The page was accessible only to people in the group, so she said it essentially was a secret page the two could use to talk.
“We spent an hour plus in the morning online and three, four, five, eight hours at night every day,” Gray said.
She said Iwan used the word “friend” or “best friend,” while at the same time saying, “I love you” or “I’m falling in love with you,” and making plans for the future. “He led me to believe for a number of months that our meeting was to explore a potential relationship between the two of us,” she said.
So now Gray is suing Iwan for $8,386.88 — the amount she claims to have spent on the courtship. For his part, Iwan says that Gray is simply batsh*t, and I’m sort of inclined to believe him based solely on the fact that she’d sue over a series of events that happen all the time in human relationships.
Iwan says he and Gray were just Facebook friends who played Mafia Wars together, but the friendship developed into an online relationship. Still, he said, he told her she was welcome to visit during spring break as “my friend.”
When he met someone new, he said he was upfront with Gray about it and initially she was OK with it. But then, the 35-year-old who works at Applebee’s said, Gray started a hate group about him on Facebook and called him an online predator.
“I want this lady to move on and leave me alone,” said Iwan, who had to find an attorney in Michigan to represent him. “It’s a completely frivolous lawsuit.”
I believe there’s an old country song relevant to all of this, and here is its story told with SIMS animation…
(HT: The Hairpin)