A Guy's Point of View - A Guest Post.

Honest or not, here I come.....

....I'm considering that as my new tag line for online dating profiles. I want to talk about honesty and internet dating. Although I consider myself more honest than some people, I am still not perfect. So standing here waving the mighty banner of Honesty makes me squirm a little.

Honesty is the best policy, as Franklin originally said. So why is it so often replaced by some other policy? I think fear and shortsightedness combine to sabotage honesty. Your online dating profile is a blank slate, and you must supply all the "facts". It's inevitable that you'll consider the consequences of choosing one fact over another. Gee, am I five-eight or five-nine? I know which one sounds better (OK, that one hits a little too close to home.) With no one to stop you, and visions of your Prospective Mate selecting or discarding your profile, you choose the better-looking fact, and the first little chunk of honesty erodes.

The web sites sometimes are complicit in this, too. PlentyOfFish.com has many checklists where you must choose a value. For drinking and drug use, your choices are "Often", "Socially", or "No". So if you have one glass of wine with dinner every day, you're an "Often" drinker. Someone who gets blitzed twice a week drinks "Socially". There's a certain lack of precision in all this. In my case, I smoked marijuana once in 2005, in Amsterdam (I was led to believe that it was a cultural requirement), and twice in 2008. "No" is certainly not the honest answer to "drug use" for me. But "Socially" makes it look like I get high and listen to Hendrix every Friday night. Many other users on that web site see it in those terms, and one of the most frequent messages I got was basically "Nice profile, but what's with that drug use?" I would trade a couple of messages explaining my extreme lightweightness, and the explanation would be accepted. Sort of. (It's harder to detect a fisheyed expression in cyberspace.)

So guess what? My profile now says "No" for drug use. I will still be explaining my oh-so-infrequent tokes to my Potential Mate, but I'll be doing it face-to-face now, not in some ham-handed way with email. I'm not afraid of my actual record; I just want a chance to present it fairly.

But that's a slippery slope. Do I fudge the height thing, trusting that when I show up I'll be so charming that my blatant error of fact will be excused? What about age? Weight? Misleading photos? These things are so common in internet dating that they are practically clichés, and these lies all fly to pieces at the first meeting or soon thereafter. Why would people risk such severe consequences? The new relationship, even if it survives that shock, now has to deal with distrust right from the start.

I don't know why, but I'm guessing that fear drives these poor decisions. You envision the Potential Mate scanning profiles, trying to choose one to respond to, and weighing the "facts" in each one. You're very afraid that you might not make the cut, and better "facts" mean that you have a better chance to make the cut. The shortsightedness lets you see the Potential Mate going through this process, but doesn't let you see the Potential Mate freaking out when they find out they've been lied to.

While most people are afraid of missing the cut, I think I'm more afraid of letting someone down. I struggled with the best way to present my marijuana experimentation, and came up with an approach that I can live with, while knowing that it's not purely honest. In other respects, my profile is pretty darned accurate. Bottom line: I don't want to waste my time or the time of women who are attracted to my profile, but not to the real me. I'm in it for the long haul, and I don't want the tension of some discovered or undiscovered lie hanging over what is an increasingly good relationship. I want to be at peace with myself and with my sweetheart.

Oh, and that height thing? I have an inversion table at home, and after a few minutes of hanging I can get to five-foot-nine and a half! However, it's very difficult to drag that thing around to restaurants for first meetings.