Lots of other warnings about internet dating

This is a followup to Mr. Practical’s recent post: No. 1 Rule about Internet dating, in which he mentioned that if a girl posts only a pic of her face, then she’s fat.  I myself have fallen prey to that technique, most notably when I went out with a woman who said she was a former model and whose profile was a tight shot of her face, which didn’t appear to be the face of a fat woman.   Sadly, she had put on quite a bit of weight since her modeling days.  Just as an aside, the savy internet dater will try to find out where the woman did modeling.  A Lane Bryant model will be fat (for those fortunate guys who aren’t familiar with Lane Bryant - it’s a store where fat women buy clothes).

I thought I would pass along a number of other ways in which a woman’s profile can be deceiving as to her appearance.  The most common practice seems to be interposing some object between the camera and her body.  The woman will to to be artful rather than obvious about this.  She will stand behind a doric column, for example, like she’s having a fun vacation touring Greek ruins. 

My favorite way to hide appearance is to post a pic from a ski resort.  This will cover her nearly entirely, from  head to toe, leaving only a few patches of cheek and forehead exposed (much like a Moslem burka).  She thinks this pic will show her sporty, ourdoorsy, dynamic side, in addition to hiding her girth.

There are also the old standbys, including matching her clothes to the photo background.  When you’re looking at a chick wearing a dark top, against a dark background, you can’t tell where the background stops and her bulky upper arms start.

Some women post pics of themselves from years ago, before they became fat.  A year ago I went out with a woman who had a great picture.  On the phone she said that she was a former model now owned a modeling agency.  Of course, I arranged to meet her.  When she showed up I absoltely did  not recognize her.  I don’t know if the pic she posted was even of herself, but if it was her then she had aged two or three decades since it was taken.  

She looked like a sixty year old woman (and not a Farrah Fawcett-like sixty year old woman).  She even had the osteoporosis and thick ankles women sometimes get in their sixties. 

Also, never rely on the body-build self-descriptions in profiles.  Some women are accurate, but many, many are not.  The self-description average, for example, may mean actually average.  But a woman might also use it to describe herself when she is actually 5′3″ and weighs 170 pounds (note to our Michigan readers: this may actually be average for 40 year old women in Michigan).

Learn from our experience instead of making the same mistakes we made.