As I explained before, I never asked for the photos of people I met online. Photos don’t really transmit how people look. The facial expressions, the movements are absent from them. For the purposes of figuring out whether you’ll be attracted to a person, they are useless.
One of the people I met online, though, (let’s call him K.) really insisted that I visited his site and saw his photos. When I finally went to the site, I understood why he’d been so insistent. The guy was movie-star gorgeous. He was also an astronomer who made super impressive videos of his projects. And he had many cool hobbies. So, of course, I agreed to meet him as soon as possible.
When I got to the coffee-shop, however, the guy wasn’t there. Instead, the ugliest person I had ever seen stood up to greet me.
“Hi, you are here to meet me!” he told me.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Yes, you are. This wasn’t my website I sent you. It was my friend’s.”
“Why did you say it was yours?” I asked.
“Well, I’m very ugly, as you can see. I didn’t want to scare you off.”
I couldn’t really argue with these statements, so we sat down to have coffee.
K. turned out to be not only painfully unattractive but also extremely boring. I can chat up a marble statue if I really try, but every effort I made was hopeless. K. was mostly silent. Pretty much the only time he opened his mouth was to tell me he had made dinner reservations.
I grew desperate. All I wanted to do was leave but I didn’t know how to break that to K. Suddenly, I had a brilliant idea. I saw a man and a woman who were sitting a few tables away from us and who looked very much in love. Even though I’d never seen them before, I decided to use them for my purposes.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe this!” I exclaimed in a tragic voice while staring at the happy couple. “I can’t believe he is doing this to me!”
“What’s going on?” K. asked.
“See this man over there? He is my ex-boyfriend. And he is here with the woman he dumped me for. Oh, this is too painful!”
At that point, I kind of almost believed my own drama and managed to burst into very helpful tears.
“I’m sorry,” I wept into my napkin. “I can’t take this right now. Seeing them together is too painful. I need to go.”
Then I got up and ran away.
Lesson learned: if people insist on showing you their photos, something fishy is probably going on.

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