My 82-Year Old Father Had So Many Girlfriends He Couldn't Believe His Luck

IT WAS ONLY AFTER my father died that I got access to his conversations with the creatures who fleeced him.

- Christopher Ketchman

He was so enamored by the members of what he jokingly called his “harem”— women online who may not have existed in real life but who nonetheless ran off with his money—that he printed the transcripts of their dialogues and filed them in metal cabinets in his office in Cobble Hill. This was in keeping with his diligent habits of organization and documentation. My father, Brian Ketcham, had been a transportation engineer and urban planner of some renown in New York. Upon his death in 2024, the New York Times thought his life and work important enough to run a 1,100-word obituary, in which he was declared an “influential environmentalist.”

In his 80s, retired for more than a decade, he was spending his days conversing via chat on his office desktop, blinds drawn, with the still image of a large-breasted, smoky-eyed blonde from Russia named Vasilisa—a common name, I would learn later, for striving heroines and would-be princesses in Slavic fairy tales.

According to Brian’s notes, which I discovered not long after his death, Vasilisa, whom he'd met on Dream Singles, a dating website, was five-foot-five-inches tall, 108 pounds. He'd written her ID number carefully on a printout of her profile page. ZODIAC: LIBRA. EYES: GRAY. AGE: 33. What was her real identity? My father never speculated. He believed in Vasilisa. I thought perhaps she was a canny AI bot or perhaps some dude in his mom's basement in Moscow. There was some slight chance she was a real woman who'd signed up to meet her dream man.