Another Black Eye for Online Dating

"Lacking inspiration and a moral compass, some online daters are borrowing other people's witty Web profiles".
(From a 2/15/08 Wall Street Journal article titled "The Cut-and-Paste Personality")

Online dating has always had an image problem. Years ago, before they became mainstream institutions, dating sites and personal ads were commonly believed to be the last refuge of the terminally unattractive: the losers of the dating world. Over time, as the loser image began to fade, the con artist image came to the forefront. Married men would pose as single. Green-card-seeking beauties from Eastern Europe would profess their fascination with much older American men. Gold diggers of both sexes would prey on the recently-widowed.

And even those whose intentions were pure often felt the competitive pressure to stretch the truth. A forty-five year old became a "thirty-something". The Arby's assistant manager was now a "restaurant industry executive". And everyone, it seems, was height-weight proportionate and looked ten years younger than whatever chronological age he or she chose to be.

Successful online dating has always required a certain degree of skepticism and street smarts. Savvy users of dating sites quickly learn to spot the red flags---the requests for money, the premature intimacies or inappropriate sexual references, the inability to give a simple answer to a simple question. But now, it seems, we have a new category of online deception to deal with, one that does not necessarily come with the usual red flags: the ad-copy thief.

The Wall Street Journal article I referred to documents a disturbing trend of people who read other people's profiles, and then simply pick and choose facts, figures, and phraseology from them to create their own profile. And it's not necessarily just lifting a phrase here or there or a clever headline; it can be claiming someone else's entire educational and career achievements, and even their hobbies. One guy, a pharamaceutical salesman, admitted that he was too lazy to come up with anything clever, so he simply copied word-for-word the profile of a prize-winning opera composer. Of course, the sham was eventually exposed when he went out with a woman who had answered his ad, who, naturally enough, started quizzing him about his operas.

I'm not against online dating. In fact, I met my wife through a personal ad, and I think that everyone in the dating world should at least give it a try at some point. But I do think that it is a mistake to put all of your time and effort into online searches, as opposed to face-to-face ways of meeting. Say what you will about bars and singles events, but you at least know within a very short time how old the person you're talking to appears to be, how he talks, how he dresses, whether he has any social skills, and, perhaps most importantly, whether there is any chemistry between the two of you.

And, yes, he can be lying through his teeth. But liars are more quickly exposed through the give-and-take of conversation than in the more controlled environment of online profiles and e-mail exchanges. In the online world, truth is a slippery thing. Although it's probably better (as Samuel Johnson said) to be sometimes cheated than never to trust, your trust in an online profile shouldn't be blind. Don't be shy about asking questions, and don't hesitate to bail out if you don't believe the answers.