When someone asks me how tall I am, I don’t have one answer. Despite the empirical, objective fact that I’m five foot 11, my height is actually more of a Schrodinger’s number, changing depending the observer.
To prospective dates on Tinder it’s six foot two, on Hinge, where an element of realism is expected, it’s six-foot exactly. A white lie, the sort which has been told by men for generations before smartphones even existed, the sort men and women will probably tell till the end of time.
You might think that there’s a world of difference between this sort of relatively harmless mistruth and the elaborate scams conducted by Tinder Swindler Simon Leviev. And there is. I don’t think anyone out there is suggesting that lying about your height is the same as scamming innocent women out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. But the culture of deception inherent in dating apps is how we ended up with the Tinder Swindler.
Modern dating is, for lack of a better more delicate turn of phrase, a meat market. In any major city, anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection has access to the profiles of thousands and thousands of prospective suitors. And this takes a toll. You soon realise that you’re not just competing against people in your immediate vicinity, but you’re in a constantly-revolving digital slot machine alongside literal millionaires, humans with more abs than you’ve had hot dinners and those that have led more interesting and exciting lives than anyone you’ve ever met.
It’s within the context of this brutally meritocratic feeding frenzy that people feel the need to upsell. A face-tune here, a selective crop there, an inch added onto height; there’s a thousand different tweaks that people make to stand out.
It’s not just common, it’s almost expected. Nearly a year into my relationship with my current girlfriend, I still like to remind her that she originally set her location as yuppie Chiswick, rather than the slightly less glamorous East Acton, where she actually lived.
Because I knew the way people use dating apps, I saw this slightly inaccurate location as nothing more than a hook designed to reel me in.
I daresay there was a time before internet dating when lying about where you live would be seen as a far greater sin, but to me, it was nothing insidious. She was right, I probably wouldn’t have swiped on her if I knew she lived in Acton. And that may well have denied me a great relationship.
In a perfect world, I would say total honesty is absolutely the best policy. You should be totally honest and expect the same from a partner. But, when there are plenty of other fish in the sea and they’re all swimming in the same direction as you towards the ladyfish, it stands to reason you want to stand out.
And this is the sad truth about why Simon Leviev’s scam was ultimately so successful. Dating apps are set up to benefit those who have pictures of themselves in private jets, with £30,000 watches, smiling as they survey the world that they master. The instagramification of mating sends the message that your emotional happiness is tied to the flashiness of your profile.
And when people match with you, there’s a tolerance for a few of the common white lies. You’re willing to overlook the minor flaws that were airbrushed out. Again, this trend only serves to benefit people like the Tinder Swindler. If you’re used to overlooking small things, you may not notice the tell-tale signs that give someone away as a professional romance fraudster. If you’re willing to overlook the fact that they said they lived in Chiswick, why would you be rigorously scrutinising everything else they’d ever told you?
The great catch about dating is that, at least at the beginning, it’s fundamentally misleading. You hide elements of yourself until you’re comfortable revealing them; you hide bodily functions until you feel you can’t anymore. This has been true for as long as people have existed. Dating apps have supercharged this, turning us all into salespeople for our own lives. And while not everyone on Tinder asks their dates to open four American Express cards and max them out, we’re all swindling in our own way.
