When I first put up my Match.com profile, I told myself that it painted a fairly accurate portrait of me. It seems like I was right.
At a downtown bar a couple of weekends into my online dating foray, a man approached me and asked if he knew me. “It’s Megan, right?” he said.
Well, my photos were accurate enough to I.D. me in a bar. The man – we’ll call him Kevin – and I had exchanged a couple of e-mails. Now here we were, sizing each other up.
This chance meeting, at a bar too lame to name, made me instantly more comfortable about potentially going on a date with Kevin. After all, he seemed personable, had a normal-looking entourage, and wasn’t carrying a sub-machine gun. Surely my parents would approve?
As it turns out, seeing Kevin in person might have been a very good turning point in our fledgling online courtship.
“Something that our research has shown is just that there’s something about live, face-to-face contact that’s very different than any impression you get on someone’s profile,” says Paul Eastwick, Northwestern psychology Ph.D student who has studied speed dating.
Eastwick, who tried out Match for less than a week in 2002, says that when he and Professor Eli Finkel tried speed dating to gauge its use as a research tool, they found that they could get a good sense of a person during the four-minute interactions. Online dating, on the other hand, breaks a person into constituent parts like hobbies and hair color, which Eastwick says he has a hunch makes it harder to really get to know someone.
I get the chance to test Eastwick’s theory when I meet Ray, the meringue-loving engineer, for coffee. In person, Ray and I don’t really discuss dancing, which was featured heavily in his profile, or music videos, which I mention in mine. This seems to fit with what Eastwick told me. After all, I don’t spend all my time talking about Spike Jonze’s pet projects.
Ray won brownie points not only for listening patiently to why post-war Europe is so cool to study, but also because he quickly initiated the coffee date. While most of my interactions with potential matches stagnated thanks to stilted AOL Instant Messenger conversations, my interaction with Ray instantly became more three-dimensional.
At the start of the date, Ray and I were a bit like a sorority woman and a potential pledge. I tiptoed around topics, trying to discern what might lead to a meaningful discussion with a perfect stranger. But as if I’d suddenly found a girl worthy of dirty rushing, I quickly felt comfortable with Ray and was willing to share more about myself. By the end of our coffee date, we agreed to go out a second time.
It also helped that he was pretty hot in person. As someone’s who overanalyzed her own profile photo selections, I was relieved by his appearance. After all, 88 percent of online daters are most worried about deception, according to Jeff Hancock, an associate professor in Cornell University’s Department of Communication who researched how people represent themselves – possibly use inaccuracies – on Internet dating sites.
Sometimes, lies are pretty obvious. In one of my early perusals of the men whom Match.com deemed fitting for me, I came across the profile of a man who wrote very little about himself, but whose photo screamed ‘Avoid.’ No, he wasn’t heinously ugly or sporting a neck tattoo. In fact, he looked too handsome. I was convinced that the photo he provided came from a little-known Burberry ad campaign, or perhaps an outtake from an Abercrombie & Fitch shoot. Maybe I didn’t give this fellow a fair shot, but I was in no mood to be scammed by someone adept at Google image searches.
“We think that technology kind of provides opportunities and ways of lying, and at the same time constrains lying,” says Hancock, who is also director of the Computer-Mediated Communication Research Laboratory at Cornell.
The opportunities to lie are pretty evident. Like a Facebook user who untags all but the most flattering photos, online daters choose pictures with nice lighting or pick older photos that gloss over the signs of aging, Hancock says. That factors into the constraint on lying, as well. After all, if someone stumbles upon a profile of someone they know, or eventually meets that handsome stranger, plenty of awkwardness could ensue if they no longer look like they did at the senior prom.
But while most of the online dating community knows that it’s easy to add a couple of inches or subtract a few pounds, some lies are considered unacceptable. Chief among those is lying about relationship status, Hancock says.
It’s hard to say if any married men are winking my way, although I do find myself snubbing the occasional divorcé or single father. At first I wondered why these men, many of whom indicated they wanted to meet women older than myself, would contact me, considering my own preferences call for childless men who were never married.
After consulting my expert panel, I learn that not all online daters are starry-eyed romantics. Evidently, sites like Match are the new frontier of casual hook-ups. Funny, that wasn’t in the fine print when I signed up.
