PHOTO: Composite. emmaperrier28/Instagram, adamguzel/Instagram

Are you ready for the best catfishing story in maybe all of history? On Thursday, The Atlantic published a modern-day fairytale that’s almost too good to be true — much like the first guy Emma Perrier fell in love with. Two years ago, restaurant manager Emma Perrier, who lived just south of London, decided to sign up for a dating app called Zoosk. She was looking for a relationship, not just a hookup. “I’m a romantic,” Emma, originally from France, told The Atlantic. “I love to love, and I want to be loved, too.”

Soon, she got a message from a good-looking guy who called himself Ronnie, short for Ronaldo Scicluna. He said he was 34 (Emma was 33 at the time) and an electrician. He was Italian but lived in England. They began exchanging messages and hit it off right away. Emma was flattered that Ronnie was interested in her. But there was a catch (of course): Ronnie was actually 53-year-old Alan Stanley, recently divorced and very lonely. He’d uploaded pictures of a “random male model” that he found online — a practice known as catfishing.

To keep the ruse going, Alan made excuses for not meeting Emma in person, even as their relationship became serious, or at least, serious to her. Eventually, though, friends and family convinced Emma that something was up; she used Reverse Image Search to find out where “Ronnie’s” pictures were from and discovered that they were actually of a Turkish model named Adem Guzel. Emma kept the relationship going while she did more research and eventually uncovered Ronnie’s true identity: Alan.

This is where the story gets downright unbelievable. Emma messaged Adem on Facebook to tell him that his pictures were being used in a scam, and they began talking on the phone and via FaceTime. They lost contact for a bit, during which time Emma and Alan, now using his real name and identity, met a few times in person. But eventually, Emma realized she wasn’t interested in Alan and wanted the man she’d seen in those pictures. She called it off with Alan, and this past April, met Adem when he arrived to London to see her. And then they fell in love. Adem and Emma have been living together for six months. Finally, something good in the world!