Quit toying with my sense of self-worth!

I’ve discovered a new annoying aspect of internet dating: guys who misrepresent themselves.

Pshaw, you may say… especially if you are some kind of weird 19th century throwback. Misrepresentation in internet dating is as old as the internet itself. Indeed, the very first internet dating profile was probably Tim Berners-Lee boasting that he could benchpress his own weight and that he drove a Porsche.

Well, while it’s true that misrepresentation itself isn’t new, I believe I’ve discovered a new angle – guys who misrepresent down.

I’ve been chatting to a guy on gaydar whom I thought seemed nice. His profile picture showed an average-looking guy, perhaps a little out of shape and perhaps a little awkward. Since I’m a fairly average sort of guy, I thought that maybe he and I might be suitable for each other. So we arranged to have a coffee date.

However, when I rolled up to the café, the guy in the profile photo was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he’d sent his considerably hotter brother. If he was the same person, as he claimed, then the profile photo must have been taken under fluorescent lights, after he’d been awake for 24 hours, and possibly after he’d just heard that his boyhood puppy had died.

I mean, what sort of guy posts a profile photo that actually makes him look worse than he really is?

So we had our coffees and chatted. He was a nice guy, and interesting to talk to, but we both seemed to realize that he was way out of my league. We parted after an hour with no more intention to meet again other than a basic, “I’ll message you.”

The annoying thing is that if I’d known how tall, dark and handsome he really was, I never would have bothered to express an interest in him in the first place. But now, thanks to his misrepresenting down, he’d wasted an hour of his life and I’d had my nose rubbed in the fact that there’s a world of hot, desirable men out there that I can’t have.

I’ll be charitable and assume that because he’s just come out of a relationship with another hot guy, and that they were probably surrounded by a social circle of other hot guys, maybe he just assumed that being hot was normal. Maybe the fact that he’s been out of circulation a while means that he’s forgotten what truly average looks like.

Still, it kind of pisses me off.