Fraud prince
I broke up with a guy I was dating after discovering he’d lied about his age on the dating app we’d met on. (He’s 48, not “39.”) I’d told him honesty’s a big deal for me. He claimed he’s honest with those he cares about and at work and argued that everybody lies on dating sites. I’m not buying that. Isn’t someone either honest or not?
— Skeptical
There’s that saying, “act your age,” and he is — as a guy cresting 50 who wants a girlfriend who still sometimes gets carded.
Chances are you consider yourself an honest person. But you’re not. None of us is. In the words of TV’s Dr. House, “Everybody lies.” Social psychologist Bella DePaulo concurs. In her research on lying, she explains that people can’t be “tossed into one of two moral bins, one for the people who are honest and the other for the liars.”
In fact, we all lie in ways we don’t even recognize as lies. Do you wear control-top tights or Spanx? A push-up bra or a squishyou-down bra? How about under-eye concealer? (Note that it isn’t called under-eye revealer: “All the better to show off my ginormous, dark, puffy eyebags!”)
These less-than-truthful forms of self-presentation are a lighter shade of the lie this guy told: an “instrumental” lie — a lie used as an “instrument” to get others to give us “material rewards or other personal pleasures or advantages” they wouldn’t if we told the truth.
But consider that people who don’t lie their way through life might see lies in an online dating profile as sort of Spanx-type fibbies: a way to game an unfair system, a la, “I’m so much younger than my real age, and the hot young women I want would see that — uh, if only I could get around their searches where they cut out my age group.”
Getting a realistic sense of a man’s true character probably takes listening and watching over time, especially when he doesn’t know you’re doing it. That should help you avoid missing out on good guys who occasionally retrofit the truth with a little Spandex. And you’ll know to ditch those who are ethically iffy — or worse: for example, some other 48-yearold dude who has the firm body of a man half his age — and if he keeps it in his basement freezer, no one will be the wiser.