It begins innocently enough—a message that makes you smile, a perfectly timed “good morning,” the comfort of someone who always seems to get you. They listen, remember, respond. They send playlists and poems, talk about favourite meals, tell you how rare it is to find someone “real” online. Except they’re not real—at least, not in the way you think. Welcome to chatfishing, where relationships are built not on presence, but on performance. “It’s the new emotional catfishing,” says Delhi psychologist Dr Rachna Khanna Singh. “It’s not always about fraud. Often, it’s about fear—the fear of not being loved as you are.”
In India, where conversations increasingly begin on screens rather than across tables, chatfishing has quietly become the love language of loneliness. The deception isn’t always malicious. Sometimes it’s just wishful thinking. “Digital intimacy gives us permission to become ideal versions of ourselves,” says sociologist Shivani Gupta of Mumbai University. “The trouble begins when we start believing our edited selves deserve more love than our real ones.” When the lie cracks—as it inevitably does—it’s not just trust that breaks, but identity. “You grieve a person who never existed, but also the person you were with them,” says Dr Singh.
For Karan Ahirrao, a 28-year-old graphic designer from Pune, the revelation was both absurd and devastating. “We met on Instagram,” he says. “We texted for months, every day. I’d send her memes, she’d send selfies. Then one day, I noticed her background was always blurred. I asked for a video call. She refused, saying she was camera-shy. Two weeks later, she disappeared.” When he reverse-searched her pictures, they belonged to a Korean lifestyle blogger. “I wasn’t angry,” he admits. “I was embarrassed by how much I’d shared—how much of me she knew.”
Unlike catfishing, chatfishing doesn’t always demand money. It trades in attention, fantasy, and emotional control. The question, then, isn’t just why people lie online, but why we keep believing them. Maybe it’s because chat feels safer than touch. Or because the version of love that lives in our phones feels better than the complicated one outside it. “We’ve confused intimacy with immediacy,” Gupta notes.
The best antidote to chatfishing, as Dr Singh puts it, “isn’t cynicism, it’s courage—the courage to show up as yourself, imperfect but real.” Because in the end, what we’re all searching for—through our emojis, our long texts, our curated selves—is not a perfect conversation, but a true one.