When the Profile and the Person Don't Match
I matched with this girl on Hinge three days ago who looked absolutely beautiful and I was really excited to meet for a date yesterday because she said she already knew me in person. But there's a red flag here because what I saw on her dating profile didn't remind me of any girls I knew in person. Even her name wasn't ringing a bell. Although my mind kept giving me a picture of this girl that I remember thinking that she's not that attractive, especially because she's significantly overweight. And my mind kept saying that that's the girl her, that's her. And I'm like, no, it can't be. I did a video yesterday titled Hinge Date Anxiety, Money Fear and Saying Goodbye to My Dog.
My mind was trying to warn me. But when I showed up yesterday, well, I got the real deal. As soon as I saw her, I felt like a popped balloon. I'm like, oh my God, of course I know her. And I can see why. I didn't pay much attention to her. And I just felt so sad and disappointed for so many reasons.
Please Be Honest on Your Dating Profile
My whole point with this video is to try and encourage all of you, be honest on your dating profile. I know exactly why a girl would put her most beautiful pictures up that to me looked like they were from years ago and use that to try and hook someone and then hope that you could convert that into a relationship. I was shocked at how bad I felt. And I'm grateful that I noticed that it wasn't just her. Now, yes, I had gotten for a few days, three days ago when I matched with her on Hinge. We had a nice text conversation for like an hour.
And then I talked with her again two days ago. We'd had another nice conversation and scheduled to meet up yesterday and take a walk in a park. And I was so excited because she seems so perfectly aligned with my life, except that there's an amount of extra weight that just doesn't matter. And I'm grateful that I noticed that it wasn't just her. And I'm grateful that I noticed that there's an amount of extra weight that just totally physically turns me off. And meeting up with her, I was like, I wouldn't, the dishonesty really got to me because she told me that, well, there's just like 10 extra pounds and her friends put her profile up for her.
But at the same time, she said that she's done a lot of online dating and that a dating app at one point offered her to get paid to go date guys in different cities. So on one hand, she was saying that it was just a minor difference. And on another hand, she was saying that she has deep experience with dating apps. She did validate my profile and say that my profile looked really nice, which good. My profile is an accurate representation of the me you get now. I don't have pictures from 10 years ago where my face is absolutely no signs of wrinkles on it.
And my hair is longer and beautiful and combed over. I have everything as rigorously honest on my profile.
I Get the Temptation to Lie About Age and Height
I know it's tempting because I'm 41 now, and I'd love to match with some of these girls that have set their filters to 39. And if I just lied about my age, I can match with some girls that probably really turned me on a lot more than some of the ones I've been matching with. And if I added a few inches to my height, I could do the same. And I recognize this isn't just a guy and a girl thing. I know girls get crushed when they meet up with a guy who adds several inches to his height, takes several years off his age, and also doesn't accurately present his appearance. If you feel that same pull to shave years off your age or add inches to your height just to get more matches, I understand it completely, and I would be glad to talk through a more honest approach that actually works with you on a call with me.
This is something that's difficult for everybody. And what I realized talking to her is that she was really triggering me on the things I'd done. I am proud that as we walked together, and it was just, every moment felt awful because I like to be there to help make a girl feel good, to feel good about herself, to feel that I'm having a great time with her. And I felt so bad that I have this just popped balloon crushed reaction as soon as we meet up in person. And I know she can tell. I know she can see that I feel bad and that the feeling bad was, it was personal.
I keep coming back to this idea of showing up as who you really are across every video in my my Dating playlist.
Like it was her. It was not something else. It was like, I felt awesome. And then as soon as she walked up, I felt awful. And I'm proud of how well she took it. I guess this has probably happened to her a few times before. And I'm proud I told her, I said, look, the profile you showed me was so different than the reality I see in person that I did. Not recognize you at all from knowing you in real life. That I struggled to even remember anything about her because the picture my mind was trying to show me, I'm like, that can't be her.
Look how beautiful this girl is. That can't be her. And it was, I do feel validated. At least my mind had an accurate memory of this girl. But I also told her she, when she talked about the weight, she said it in the context of, well, I've just gotten to a place of real love and acceptance with myself. And I'm proud of that. And I'm proud of myself. And I just love myself. And I just, I don't want to be with somebody who can't accept me as I am.
What Self-Love Actually Looks Like
So I countered and I said, look, I love myself too. And yet when I, I used to be 80 pounds overweight myself, I weigh 170 now. I'm five foot 11. I have awesome, cardio, cardio. I can go do a yoga power flow class. I have 130 pounds of muscle. Like I'm very proud of how my body is today. And loving myself to me means saying no to cookies and candies and cakes and ultra processed foods. And it means I did the hard work to cut back my meat intake to almost zero and to eat a whole plant based diet based on reading the book, how not to die.
Loving myself means that I look at this body like a car and I try and put the right gas in it. And even though it tastes great in the moment to eat something like a cookie or a piece of cake or candy, and that other people around me might doing it. I say no, because I love myself because I love this body and I want to take great care of it. And just like how I stopped drinking, loving myself and poisoning the body with alcohol do not go together. And same thing with food and the way I look at it, like putting food in here that causes the body to be bloated and overweight.
And I have to detoxify and strains the body. That's not self love that's delusion. And I know because I've been in the delusion thinking I love myself going around 80 pounds overweight, drinking alcohol and eating a bunch of food that leaves me overweight and feeling bad. So I also, countered her by saying that too. And I hope that while this was definitely a hard date with her, I hope that I helped her see that, tricking people into meeting you based on how you used to look years ago is wrong and hurtful and deceptive. And that bothered me much more than having a bit of extra weight.
The deception was revolting. And therefore I, I suggest always set the bar low. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that's lower if you can, when my ex met me dating, I just put regular old pictures of me. She thought I was barely attractive enough and she was impressed that in person, I was more attractive than my pictures. That's the angle to go. If somebody is willing to go out with you as you are, then there's an opportunity. I also was surprisingly triggered by what she did reminded me of things I did.
The Lie I Told on Match.com 15 Years Ago
When I met my ex wife 15 years ago on match com, I was intentionally deceptive when it came to drinking. I put that I was a social drinker on my profile, which was a blatant lie. I was an alcoholic who would drink three to seven nights a week and I'd consume a handler or more of vodka and some rum and 12 packs, 24 backs of beers. Like I drank anti socially playing video games on Xbox in my apartment, sometimes often drinking from like 2 p m. To four plus a m. In the morning. That's not social drinking. I rationalized it, saying that, well, I hang out with my Xbox and drink.
I dug into how much my whole approach to dating has shifted since those days in I Can't Date Like I Did 15 Years Ago.
I'm a social drinker because I knew that I didn't want a woman who'd want to be with an alcoholic. If I put a drank daily or heavily or several times a week, if I was honest, it would repulse the kind of girls I wanted to be with. I certainly get the logic of thinking that you want to repulse the kind of guy who'd want to be with this heavier version, who would accept that and you want to get a better man. I get that, but doing that stuff sets you up. For heavy disappointment, I couldn't hide my feelings. I think that's valuable because showing how hurt I was and being honest about it, I hope would help this girl change her behavior and hope save some other guys from the same experience and help her get honest like either to make changes, the changes she needs to in her life, which I don't know what those are, but I know for me, it's important for me not to deceive. If you want to look honestly at your own dating patterns with someone who won't judge you for them, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll talk through your situation.
Ironically though, seeing her deception, also got me thinking maybe I should put my birthday a few years back. Maybe I should say I'm 38. I could totally get away with 38. Then girls that are like 29 that don't want a guy older than 39, I could match them. I should just add an inch or two to my height. Who'd even notice? If I put six foot, that might work out better. That's not going to work for the long term though. When you poison the foundation with lying, I don't know if I would have got with my ex wife. If I had been honest about my drinking, she probably would have ran if she knew what an alcoholic I was.
That would have been healthy for me to either get rejected and to try and fix myself up to get the kind of woman I wanted, like get sober and lose weight, or just be with a woman who's an alcoholic and you can both drink together like alcoholics.
Why Honesty Brings the Right People Close
The value of honesty is that it brings the right people close to you who are actually representing where you're at in your life and pushes the ones away from you that are not. So I'm really grateful that me being rigorously honest with her also helped me get honest with myself. I am grateful. She said something about that we could be friends or something. I have no interest in being friends with someone who led with deception. That's a critical deal breaker to me. And yet, how much have I deceived in the past? And how can I be rigorously honest with her? And how can I be honest today?
I noticed also an uncomfortable level of honesty. And yes, I may have a pretty face and a body that's in shape, but I noticed an ugliness inside of me walking around with this girl too.
The Ugliness I Noticed Inside Myself
What I noticed is that I didn't immediately recognize her when she told me her name and the context she knew me in, because even though I'd seen her a number of times and she knew me well, I wasn't paying any attention to her. Because I notice I primarily, if you're a girl, I primarily, pay attention to attractive women. And if you're not an attractive woman, I generally am not paying attention to you. She was talking about how some family members talk down on people that make minimum wage or things like that. I would argue mine in some ways is worse. If you're not a man I think of as successful in terms of you do something useful for the world, you have money, and or you're a parent raising your kids, or you're a guy that's committed to being a quality man.
If I don't think of you as a successful man, or as an attractive woman, and I guess you could put successful as more of a broad category, but you're not even part of my world. I can't even hardly think of you. And that I was facing as I looked at her deception as being ugly, and then the disillusion, the unable to be even honest with herself about these things. I look at it, wow. I look at myself as this nice, generous person who is not so superficial, who wants to go deep with people. Yeah. If you meet my superficial criteria, I will give you my heart and you'll get the best of me.
But if you don't meet my superficial criteria, I'll do everything I can to minimize my time and attention that I give you. And that's ugly, isn't it? Like, wow. So I'm grateful for this experience, even though I felt catfished and I felt like I'd wasted my time. I never would have met up with this girl if she'd been honest on her profile. It's like, okay, what have I learned from this? I'm still grateful for this experience. And I'm grateful for my emotional resilience because, this totally ruined my day yesterday. I was so excited to see her in person. And I was even willing to admit that maybe I just wasn't paying very good attention.
But no, I am grateful my brain had an accurate memory. And it's like, yeah, I can see why I wasn't doing it. I can see why I wasn't paying attention. So I hope this experience is useful. Never be dishonest on your dating profile. If you don't want to put that you drink all the time, or you don't want to put a picture of you today on your dating profile, then maybe you should look at working on yourself and make yourself the kind of person that you'd be proud to be honest about. And from there, when you can be rigorously honest, you can attract someone who's really right and sees you where you actually are.
Turning the Hurt Into a Desire to Help
The best part about this too, though, is it really stirred up a desire. I'm like, I want to help people lose weight. Because there's so many people, like the one thing is the weight. And I've lost the 80 pounds. I've kept it off for a decade. I take great care of myself. And as I've been stuck and still feeling so hurt, both off of her behavior and the reflections on what that means about me, I, I tried, I was thinking, please, give this girl a chance. So much of the rest of her is awesome. We are so compatible in so many other ways. I'm like, please just give this girl a chance.
If you want the full story of how I dropped the weight and kept it off, I walked through every step in How I Lost 80 Pounds and Transformed My Health (Full Story).
Could not do it. My entire body felt shut down. And my heart felt completely closed and hurt. And my mind was like desperately just trying to make some conversation. And even I eventually got silent. Can you picture me getting silent? And she's like, what's wrong? I'm like, what's wrong? And I then I explained all this to her face. And I've read I've filmed this video three different times to try and be as, appropriate for public audiences as possible. After Google said I shouldn't say certain things in the video, try and be a good boy for Google. And I've also thought I'm like, I do want to communicate like I am grateful for this experience, but it's not sustainable.
And I would hope I would never get tricked like this again. And I would hope, we can build a world of being honest with people. And I know deception is so tempting. But don't do it. And I want to help people lose weight out there. I've lost the weight and it did. I came away from this thinking, man, I wish I could help a girl like her drop the 30 or 40 pounds because then she'd be perfect for me. She it would I'm like, I want to help all these people overweight, drop the weight because I've done it. And I know a lot of people feel hopeless on the weight and have even gotten so delusional that they think it's, it's okay.
And maybe it is for some people, at least in my world. And for a lot of guys, I know it's not. And it's like, I was so down. The only thread I could hold on to is like, what can you use to help someone else from this experience? It's like I can make a video to help someone else with this experience. And I can use this experience to see how what I can do to help people be as healthy as I am.