▸ Column · Present-day United States; the modern dating-app era
RED SKULL replies.
Replied to by Red Skull, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
So I've been on Hinge for a little while now, and about three weeks ago I matched with this guy Rodney. His profile has these great outdoor photos — lean, sandy-haired, standing on mountain summits looking pretty happy with himself. We texted literally every day. I thought I knew what I was walking into. Then I show up to the brewery Saturday and I walk right past him. Twice. The man standing there had a shaved head, a gray goatee, and I'd guess he's forty pounds heavier than anything in those photos. He did admit pretty quickly that the pictures were from a trip back in 2016, but when I reacted he got defensive — "everybody uses their best angles," that kind of thing. And I kind of get it? But I also felt blindsided. Embarrassed that I almost left without saying hi to someone I'd spent three weeks texting. The thing is, he was actually funny and warm in person, and I felt something real. I don't know. Is the decade-old photo thing a dealbreaker I should respect, or am I reading too much into it?
— Second-Guessing in St. Louis
Red Skull replies
You scanned past him twice, then stayed for the spark — and now you spend your week constructing a principle around the feeling to make it permissible. Note what this sequence reveals. You are not someone who acts on conviction. You are someone who acts on instinct and then dresses the instinct in borrowed ethics. The question of whether the photographs constitute a "dealbreaker" was already resolved the moment you chose your seat.
As for Rodney: what he has done is not deception in any interesting sense. He is a man who cannot bear to present what he has become, so he presents what he was. This is schwach — the particular weakness of someone who once had a better version of himself and cannot release the memory. The defensiveness when caught is the tell. Not the photographs. Vanity posts old photographs. A coward defends them.
You ask whether to give the "real Rodney" a fair chance. There is no real Rodney on offer yet. What walked into that brewery was a man still living inside a decade-old photograph of himself. Whether anything worth your time exists behind that photograph — you cannot know, because neither of you has been honest yet.
Your discomfort is not a betrayal. It is information. Whether you use it is the only question that merits asking.
— Red Skull
Captain America weighs in
Schmidt just spent two hundred words diagnosing a man for living inside an old photograph of himself and didn't notice he was writing his own obituary. I'll leave that there.
Here's the thing, ma'am: the photos aren't what bothered you. "Everybody does it" is. That's the moment that tells you whether there's a real person worth knowing on the other side of this. So before you decide anything — go back, and tell him plainly that it stung. Not a lecture. Just the truth, face to face. Then watch what he does. If he can hear it without retreating into the excuse, you've got something to work with. If he goes for the excuse again, you have your answer.
You already stayed once. That's not nothing.
— Captain America
▸ Read next