A NEW WEBSITE says it can help lonely social networking users attract more attention from the opposite sex – by giving the illusion that they’re already in a long-term relationship.

Cloud Girlfriend, a yet-to-launch startup, will invite users to define their “perfect girlfriend”, who the company will then bring into existence through a decoy social networking profile.

Users (or possibly customers?) will then be able to interact with the girl of their dreams over their preferred social network, and – in the company’s own words – “enjoy a public long-distance relationship with your perfect girl”.

The ultimate goal of the site is that its users will then appear to be worth romantically pursuing, with potential partners perhaps made jealous by the level of intimacy that their target already enjoys.

Co-founder David Fuhriman told our colleagues at Business Insider that the company would not be creating fake Facebook profiles for the fake girlfriends (to do so would be a breach of Facebook’s terms of service), and implied that the company would instead hire a network of real people who would then adopt a persona best suited to each individual beau.

He also insisted that the service was not intended to be pornographic, but would instead try to fulfil its users’ needs for intimacy, which could be filled even if the interactions were intimate.

The former claim – that the site will be staffed by actual humans – appears to hold water when put beside the site’s sign-up page, which proclaims that demand has been so overwhelming that it can only handle a limited number of customers.

How the site ultimately aims to make money remains unknown – one possibility is the inclusion of product placement in a fake girlfriend’s status updates – but more telling will be the ultimate success of a site that promises intimacy without authenticity.