Just another catfishing story…
Munich, Germany There is a lot of misrepresentation in modern swipe-dating these days. Talk to enough users about their top ten worst dates, and at least one will involve a case of gross misrepresentation. Luckily, I haven’t experienced this very often myself, or maybe I’m just getting better at spotting the inconsistencies prior to agreeing to a face-to-face meeting. However, when I do get sucked in by someone’s online façade, it leaves me scratching my head for hours. What exactly did this guy think would happen once I realized his online personality was just fake news?
For example: There was a guy I had matched with not long ago who damn near seemed like my soulmate. According to his bio (bonus points because he actually wrote a bio) he had exactly my sarcastic sense of humour, and our communication was lively and vibrant, and definitely not boring like the standard CV analysis of most Munich daters. His photos showed an attractive and adventurous man – jumping out of planes, hanging off of cliffs, etc. One of these photos (the one of the cliff), was angled from “his” chest down, I guess so you could see how deep the drop was, or maybe just in the spirit of a well-intentioned humble brag of his chiseled stomach and thighs.
I’ll be horribly superficial for the sake of this story, but if I’m being honest, I thought that the one and only physical flaw of my newfound soulmate was that he was a little bit too skinny for my perfect world. Of course, that didn’t actually matter to me. I’m only saying it now because I want you to have a clear picture of how this guy had represented himself online. For the first time in a long time I was actually both excited and nervous to meet someone from the app. In the sea of navy blue suit-wearing, BMW-driving workaholics that is Munich, he seemed like one in 1.4 million. But the skinny, adventure-loving, hilarious guy from my match history isn’t the same person who showed up.
Two minutes before we met he called me. On the other end of the phone was a weak and nervous little voice. Things were quickly getting off to a bad start. Eventually I spotted another person talking on his phone walking toward me. The slightly too skinny skydiver had mysteriously gained about 100 lbs, and of course, with that kind of weight gain, it was hard to decipher if the person standing before me bore the same face of the guy whose photos I had been swiping through. I mean, I couldn’t actually tell if I had truly been catfished – were the photos just old, or were the photos just stolen?
Whenever I tell this story and get to the part about the 100 lbs weight gain, the listener always asks how I managed to get away from him. Most of my lady friends bail after one drink if the guy they are meeting looks bad or acts badly in real life. Well, the short answer is that I didn’t try to get away from him. I wanted to see if that hilarious, sarcastic guy was still in there. So I gave him not one drink, but five hours, five drinks and a dinner – and, no, he didn’t offer to pay for even one of those drinks or my dinner.
The first thing I noticed as we walked to the restaurant was that he reeked of B.O. – a smell that would haunt me for the next five hours. Again, if this guy knew going in that he looked nothing like his photos, and that he stole his personality from an anonymous source just to get a date, you’d think in the very least he’d take a god damn shower. I mean, assholes have been getting laid since the dawn of time following the basic philosophy that you can look bad and act bad just as long as you don’t smell bad.
Making matters worse, if Fake News really had a funny and sarcastic side to his personality, he was unable to show it to me. He remained fairly reserved, quiet and kind of uptight. A fellow expat like me, I asked him why he decided to live in Munich. This is a pretty standard question for expats. I mean all people, both locals and expats alike, are interested to know why we choose to leave our countries and why specifically we choose our new homes. Fake News found this to be an offensive question and never managed to give me an acceptable answer. My handsome, adventurous, witty, soulmate simply didn’t exist. Can’t say I didn’t try, though.
I was never able to say with 100% certainty that the man in the photos was not the man I spent five smelly hours with, but I do know that when I looked at that quiet, conservative, (extra) chubby mouse sitting before me, I really just couldn’t imagine him ever scaling a mountain or jumping out of a plane. When I looked at him I just saw a shy, sad guy who likely stays holed up in his tiny Munich apartment, playing video games and ordering Domino’s night in and night out (and forgetting to bathe). Perhaps, this is why he was so offended when I asked why he moved here. Maybe he moved here, bad things happened and he fell into a depression – Munich can do that to a person, I hear. It’s pretty hard to imagine what kind of events led to this startling kind of unfortunate metamorphosis, but I guess I’ll never know.
The good news is there is a lesson in all of this. Before we start swiping for dates, we should all ask ourselves if we have represented our personalities to the best of our ability. And will the people on the other end of that screen see us the way we truly are? If not, then prepare for disappointment – both theirs and your own. There is no shame in faking it until you make it, as they say. A shy person can write a confident bio, but he or she will need to be able to fake that confidence (until it becomes real) or risk losing their date’s interest and attention. As the expression goes, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. So, you can lure your Tinder horse out on a date with your fake photos and stolen personality, but once he gets there, you better have something worth licking. 😉
wunderbar!