It turns out online dating can get you into a lot of trouble. CBS has
a list of all the ways things can go horribly wrong. To paraphrase, you could:
- Get an STD
- Be scammed
- Be sexually assaulted
- Date your long lost sibling
- Get robbed
- Be murdered
- Be stalked
- Accidentally date someone who's married
Yeah, right. Most of these are pretty far fetched and/or not specific to
online dating. But there is one big thing that can and will go wrong if you venture into the land of the internet dating profile: you could waste your time on someone who's not worth it. Fortunately, I've noticed a few common signs that a potential lover may not be the dreamgirl her profile makes her out to be. Without further ado, here are my online dating red flags:
- She likes cats. There’s just something wrong with people who like cats. Everybody knows a crazy cat lady. Nuff said.
- Her “body type” is curvy, big boned, overweight, a little extra, or anything that is at all unflattering or ambiguous. Even average is questionable. Some women are just bashful or insecure and put average when they are actually thin, but most use it to make themselves feel better about being overweight. Ideally you can ignore this and look at the pictures. But not if your up against red flags #3 or #4.
- She only has face shots in her profile pictures. The overwhelming odds are that she doesn’t want to show you that she’s fat. Tip: look at her shoulders/arms if you can see them. Sometimes that’s a good tell. If her arms are round, so is she.
- Her weight is fluctuating dramatically in the pictures. She’s thin, she’s fat, she’s thin again. You can expect to see the fat version on your date. I’ve said it before. The worst side of her is the one you’ll see in person.
- She talks incessantly about food, how much she loves to eat, etc. Are you trying to tell me something dear?
- She flakes out on one or more dates, emails, etc. Any time you expect to hear from her and you don’t, take it to mean she’s not interested, and move on. Don’t waste your time and money on her.
- She doesn’t use proper English, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. I’m not talking about internet/texting abbreviations. I’m talking about things that would give you the impression that English is not this person’s native tongue. She’s probably some dude in Thailand masquerading as a 22 y.o. horny hottie. Don’t ask me why someone would do this, or who’s dumb enough to fall for this sort of thing, but it’s surprisingly common. Bad English is one of the quickest ways to identify a scam.
- Any inconsistencies. Speaking of 22 y.o. horny hotties, I once had one emailing me sexy pics of herself. I almost responded with a Brett Favre/Anthony Weiner/Greg Oden, but luckily I noticed something strange. The time stamp on her email was 15 time zones away when she’d claimed to be local.
- Anything that seems too easy. If it seems too good to be true, it is.
