Life After College: On Lying Tinder Dates and Online Creeps

My Tinder date lied. Was I the creep?

Dating profiles can border on fiction. People edit away their pimples and crop out their exes, making it hard to know what’s real and what’s fantasy. It’s why you should research your date, and stalking is OK. That’s what I learned hunched over my laptop at 2 a.m., 26 browser tabs deep.

We met in the West Village, the result of two right swipes on Tinder. I was his first online date, he said, and he was sweetly oblivious to the genre’s conventions. Thirty minutes in, he wondered if he could make me a list of books that reminded him of me. “Of my profile?” I asked.

My date said he worked as a literary translator for the publishing arm of The New York Review of Books. A lanky 28-year-old with warm brown eyes and long hair tamed by a knit beanie, he seemed to have more prestigious degrees than friends. He had barely left the house that week, he said, thanks to a German text on navigational techniques in which an unknown word might turn out to mean “a compass made out of a special material produced only by a certain family between 1620 and 1680.”

It was a flourish on what I’ve come to believe was one of the more elaborate lies I’ve ever been told.

The day after our first date, the Tinder Translator texted me twice about the weather, and twice more about making plans. At the time, I suspected only romance — awkward, overeager, verbose. I was excited to read his translations. The weird thing was, I couldn’t find them. His name didn’t appear on the websites of the places he had told me he worked. He was not publicly linked to any of the schools he said he had attended. I even composed a few advanced Google searches using conversational crumbs from our date:

His name was common. Perhaps I’d missed something.

He had been bashful about the modeling, plausibly. Who but a polymath — my translator said he had studied math, computer science and music — would feel bad for also being nice looking?

At 2 a.m., I learned a lesson in my laptop-lit room: Stalking might not feel like stalking until you’re 26 browser tabs deep. I went to bed feeling uneasy, over my transgression more than the ones I’d begun to imagine he had committed.

First dates have always been reveals. As a teenager, I watched adults on ‘90s TV shows proposition strangers in yoga class and meet future spouses while falling in front of taxicabs. As it turns out, we don’t proposition strangers during yoga. We proposition tiny digital image reels of them, from our couches or our desks when our bosses aren’t looking.

Unlike the personal ads and blind date pitches we used to use, these reels are amazingly lifelike. They’re accompanied by troves of information: favorite songs, mutual friends, jokes. Yet still, oddly enough, our dates often end up seeming different from what we expect.

It’s why we look them up.

About 75 percent of millennials do research before a first date, according to Match.com, a dating platform that allows you to filter profiles by eye color, income and keywords like “loves shiba inu.” Helen Fisher, its resident anthropologist, assured me that researching is natural: “In hunting and gathering societies, you’d see someone at the watering hole and already know everything about them.”

My watering hole was murky, bottomless and littered with pop-up tabs asking for my credit card number.

In the coming weeks, the missing information about my date was a chasm that, when I tried to fill it, only became more intriguing. We continued to text, and went out a couple more times, though I never gained more clarity about him from our interactions. In the meantime, I’d scan the comment sections of YouTube personalities he mentioned following. I nursed theories: Had my date changed his name? Was he secretly an internet troll? Or maybe, if I looked hard enough, would I find confirmation that he was really just a sweet, accomplished Harvard graduate who happened to not have much of an online presence?

Facebook gave me hope. Although I had never sent him a friend request, I easily found his profile, and noted our 16 mutual friends, largely from New York literary circles. My roommate appeared to know nine of the same people as him, including several from Harvard.

But one afternoon, I came home to find her agitated. “I have something to tell you,” she said.

My roommate had, without my knowledge, contacted seven of their mutual Facebook friends. This would have been infuriating were it not illuminating: All had gotten back to her to say that, in fact, they had no idea who my date was. “I have him on ‘restricted profile,’ which means I definitely never met him in person,” said one, who vaguely recalled accepting my date’s friend request after seeing their mutual friends.

One person my roommate tracked down did know my date, though, and was willing to speak to me over the phone. She told me he wasn’t fluent in German (on our first date, he’d claimed to be trilingual, having spoken the language along with French and English as a child); that he had only lived, though never studied, in New Haven, Connecticut (so much for the master’s degree); and that he had a reputation for embellishing professional details.

“It’s what most people do to make themselves look better,” she said. “He just does it more.”

I panicked. Which is to say, I gave my research operation a cash injection. Through the National Student Clearinghouse’s degree verification service, I put in an official request for my date’s Harvard undergraduate attendance records ($22.95). I ran about 80 searches of people with his name under 35 from his home state and their relatives on TLOxp, a professional backgrounding database ($18.80). I hatched a plan to invite him to a local bar so that a bartender could later relay the name listed on his ID. Convincing that bartender took several gin and tonics ($42), but I needed them anyway.

The clearinghouse got back to me. “We are unable to verify a degree for this individual,” it wrote. Maybe my date had asked that his records be private?

The day of the bar sting, which would have been our fourth date, I woke up exhausted and called everything off. “I’d like to stay in contact/friends if that’s ok,” he texted back. “You’re really sweet, smart, and fun.” I felt a pang: It was a nice note. But I declined, telling him I was getting back together with an ex.

I had begun to suspect that all the research in the world would lead me to the same conclusion: My date was mentally ill, and confronting him with what I had found would be risky.

But I had another reason for ending things the way I did: I was beginning to notice that my own behavior had become twisted. I was fixated on unraveling the mysteries of this man’s tangled persona, and that was a power trip — much like, I suspect, faking your degree on Tinder must be. In order to end it, I took a page out of his book and lied.

Months later, while writing this article, I found myself sympathizing with my Tinder translator more than I expected. The strangest part of my research, I came to realize, was how little it had to do with the reasons I liked the translator in the first place. Résumés, doctored or real, might secure first dates, but they have less to do with second ones. I had been hooked by our brushed elbows and sweet banter, the rare lack of cynicism. Could those things still be true, even if his identity were false?

I wanted to be honest with him about why I ended things, and hoped that he might be honest with me, too. So I called him up.

I got my wish — sort of.

“It was kind of like a performance piece,” he said arrogantly at first, confronted with the accusation that he’d falsely represented himself. He’d been deliberately cryptic. The goal was to subvert the “shopping-like” quality of online dating, he said: “I would veil actual work experience and actual institutions I’d attended but you know, with, ambiguity but not, you know, lie.”

I’d gotten my facts wrong, he then claimed, rattling off a new list of people and places and accomplishments, very similar to but not exactly the same as the credentials he’d mentioned the first time around. One consistency was The New York Review of Books. He was, in fact, currently translating two texts for it, he said. He begged me not to fact-check this: “It will ruin my career.” Shortly after we hung up, my date called back, this time with a radically different story.

The year before meeting me, he said, he experienced a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. “I had all of these memories, which were mixed up, dreams which would seem very real,” he said. “I’d hear things that happened to other people and think they happened to me. It’s called confabulation.”

He didn’t remember what he did or didn’t say to me on our dates, he claimed. I have to suspect this was a ploy to halt further research.

But he also said he was sorry. On this, at least, I’m inclined to believe him. Of course, his feelings aren’t possible to fact-check.

On the surface, the Tinder Translator might seem like an anomaly of online dating, the thing we do research specifically to avoid. In fact, he’s its embodiment, taken to the extreme. Most people curate their digital lives to the extent that they border on fiction. We Facetune away our pimples, lift our heights by an inch and crop out our exes. We don’t consider these lies so much as a necessary capitulation: The medium requires the compression of selves into slideshows.

And we are hopeful that, when the right person comes along, they’ll look past these distortions and still see us how we wish to be. Relationships are often built on our fantasies that our partners are only their best selves. From the get-go, my date’s view of me was a projection: In a half-hour, I was a magical incarnation of a list of his favorite books.

A small part of me wishes I could be that. It’s romantic! But as long as I’m still swiping through image reels, carefully cropped and culled, I’m mostly glad I’m the real me: ready to run a late-night background check.