How should I go about convincing my mother that my foreign online boyfriend isn't out to get my holes or scam me?

Since your boyfriend’s phone is defective, you probably haven’t even video-chatted with him. If video chatting were possible, your mother could also have met and talked with him online. And if he turned out to be a nice guy with plans to visit you in the immediate future, that might have convinced her that he has no evil designs on you. But none of this has happened, or you would not have asked this question.

In any case, you seem to be impressed that he is ‘foreign’. Maybe you have talked with him on the phone, and you think his accent is sexy, or perhaps you are quite taken with the misspelled words and wobbly grammar in his texts. I would guess that his foreignness, among other things, is a good excuse for never visiting you and possibly to persuade you to send him money in the future.

So maybe you should listen to your Mom, who knows the difference between a keeper and a dud. Return to the real world. Find a flesh-and-blood man (not a digital entity) who will be there, in every sense of the word, both for you and your orifices.

I’m wondering about attachment and transference with the therapist and the idea of escape and fantasy? How much do you think your strong feelings, constant thoughts, desires to be with your therapist are a way to escape from your present life? I wonder if the transference serves another purpose than to show us our wounds and/or past experiences, but is a present coping strategy for managing what we don’t want to face (even if unconsciously) in the present—-current relationships, life circumstances, etc. Can anyone relate to this concept of escape in relation to their therapy relationship? How does this play out for you?

The problem is that online boyfriends will always be online. Their only advantage is that phone sex has never made anyone pregnant. And dollars to doughnuts — to pass the time between sexy chats, your foreign love probably has at least a few real girlfriends in his own country (wherever that may be) to stroke his libido.

If you were my daughter, I would ask myself what I had done to make one of my offspring hallucinate to the point of believing in an entity as ephemeral as an ‘online boyfriend.’ (Even the Tooth Fairy is more real.)