The Almost Universal Online Dating Mistake
There’s how you hope people see you, and then there’s how you actually are.
I fell in love with a woman online in late February of this year. She had the perfect smile and a unique voice that drove me crazy. She sent me an audio recording of her playing and singing Iron and Wine’s “Naked As We Came.” She was good. Real good.
One week she stalked my old WordPress and read every blog post I wrote early in my expat years over her morning coffee. She told me she hadn’t ever imagined that she could find someone she’d want to share her life with- until she met me. We spoke for hours a day for over three months.
I thought she knew me, and I thought I knew her.
I live 12,000 miles away from her but she lives in the Pacific Northwest, where I’m from. I was going home for the summer to see friends and family. We finally met in person and spent four days together. She picked me up from the airport. We held hands everywhere we went. We explored one another’s bodies. We shared meals. I got up early because of jet lag and let her sleep, it was the only time we were apart and she felt she’d missed out. I thought it was cute.
Two days after we parted ways (I went to spend time with family a few hours away), she text me and said she didn’t feel a romantic connection with me and that we were better off as close friends. She insisted she loved me like a sibling. I was devastated.
I knew why she broke up with me even before I prodded and got her to tell me the real reason. I even knew while we were together that it would probably happen. Call it an INFJ’s intuition but I knew I was guilty of unintentionally Kittenfishing her.
What is Kittenfishing?
Kittenfishing is an online dating strategy that many of us engage in without realizing it. Kittenfishing can be anything from using photos that are a couple of years old (yes, you can change a lot in just two years) to telling your partner that you spent the evening reading poetry when really you looked at one poem and spent the rest of the time on your phone.
Reader, I was much bigger in real life than my date expected. I’ve gained weight during the pandemic but most of my profile photos are from 2020. That’s Kittenfishing.
This past spring, I tried to be open and honest with the woman I was dating about my struggles with keeping my body weight down. The whole three months that we dated, my weight was the one thing I worried about. My love worked in the healthcare profession and was quite small, so small that I called her Mouse.
I was way too insecure to stand the phone up, walk backward five paces, and spin around to show her my full figure.
Yes, I told her I had gained weight since my last photos were taken, I even told her it was about 30lbs, which I was off on by a bit. She often saw me on a video call from the chest up, both clothed and unclothed. She insisted that she didn’t care about my weight and that I looked pretty average to her. I thought, well average has changed in the States, so I guess I am average.
But the truth is, I used to be chubby and now I’m fat. And we hadn’t talked about that. I hadn’t asked her, What if I’m fat?
I knew that on the scales I had gained weight since most of my photos in 2020, but it was only two years and when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t yet see the difference. It was only when I landed at the airport and feverishly went to the bathroom to freshen up that I suddenly saw how big I had become. In reality, once I got home to weigh myself, I’d gained 45 pounds since the summer of 2020.
Examples of Kittenfishing
When you tweak your profession to make yourself sound better, that’s Kittenfishing. I teach at a university in the Middle East and that could sound super fancy if I just left it at that, but the real truth is that the level that I teach at is more like upper Elementary level ESL. If I were to date someone and leave that out for months and months, that would be a form of Kittenfishing because they’d think I was way higher in academia than I actually am.
Last autumn I dated someone who wasn’t vaccinated for Covid, but who insisted they weren’t anti-vax. They were also broke because they were an expat in a city where most jobs required proof of vaccination. Six weeks into dating, I watched them turn down a job because they refused to get vaccinated, even though their AC had been shut off for months for financial reasons (the Middle East is freaking hot). So they told me they weren’t anti-vax, but they were so against vaccination that they’d rather go without AC on the brink of financial ruin? That’s a form of Kittenfishing.
You say video games are just a hobby for the weekend but you play them nightly, that’s Kittenfishing.
Your hairline is receding and so all your online profile photos are with a hat on (firstly, that’s a dead giveaway) but also, that’s Kittenfishing.
Someone on their dating profile says they want to start a podcast on history and that they’re into hiking, but in the two months that you talk neither subject comes up and you realize they spend every night in front of the TV eating take out (just a random example, not from personal experience). This is a form of Kittenfishing
Kittenfishing often happens when we unconsciously present who we aspire to be instead of who we actually are.
It’s something that seems harmless, even necessary in the ruthless world of Online Dating where people are bound to just swipe past you unless you showcase your best self.
We know the camera angles that suit us best, we’re the director and we control how we’re presented in our own little mini-biography where we can shape and mold the truth however we want it.
Of course, I wanted to showcase photos I had of myself at the beach in France in 2020 on my profile. All the photos I’ve taken since then have been of my dogs. There’s not too much to do in the Middle East. My clothes are all loose and flowy because they have to be. I didn’t actually think I was that much bigger.
I’ve dated women who presented as pretty femme online and only had photos of themselves with their hair down and make-up on, but after six dates, I’d only ever seen them in a slick-backed ponytail giving very clear medium-soft butch vibes. That’s sort of Kittenfishing, isn’t it? But also, it clearly shows a lack of self-awareness. With online dating, it’s often hard to know where the line is between showcasing your best self and misrepresenting yourself.
I dated a man in my twenties who’d left out that he was bipolar for the three months before we met. I understand that it takes time for people to feel comfortable enough to disclose certain things, but it was something I felt like he should have told me.
You can control how much you’re guilty of Kittenfishing by practicing self-awareness
This starts with photos. If your half of your photos are over two years old, take new ones. Even just having one recent one with a caption is helpful. One recent, full-body photo.
Self-awareness is also important in how you describe yourself, your eating habits, your interest in politics, your connection with your family, and the stories you tell about your ex. The person you’re dating will remember what you tell them and they will go and match that up with reality once they get further and further into your life. Will the story match reality?
If you’ve listed a hobby that you haven’t engaged in for the past year, make a note of that. Vulnerability is endearing.
The Consequences of Kittenfishing
Do you remember the anecdote I gave earlier about the person who said they were interested in hiking and starting a podcast but who mostly stayed at home? That was a real person I dated and this wasn’t the only area of her life where she was guilty of Kittenfishing.
She’d also used mostly photos of herself that were over 10 years old. I’m not kidding, I matched with her in 2022 and she had a photo of herself meeting Obama before he became president. So that photo was at least 13 years old. Upon close inspection, I realized that all her photos were taken around the same time. In another, she’s wearing the same pants as the Obama photo and living in San Francisco, but it had been a decade since she left San Francisco! Of course, I didn’t put all these pieces of the puzzle together when we first matched and it wasn’t enough for me to not want to see her. When we met on Zoom for the first time, I was surprised to see a much older, bigger lady smiling back at me. But I thought I’ll give this a go.
Because of her small deceptions, the photos that were way outdated, and the complete departure, her life seemed to take from the one she’d first written about; in the end, it was much easier for me to break up with her because I didn’t fully respect her. Here was a 4 woman using photos from her twenties on an online dating profile. Here was someone who called themselves a “globetrotter” but had been to less than half a dozen countries. It was obvious she liked to stretch the truth.
Losing her wasn’t so bad because the her that I lost wasn’t the person I had matched with in the first place.
I felt the same way when I broke up with the anti-vaxer in Dubai. By the time we finally parted ways, it seemed so obvious to me that she wasn’t the person matching the story she had been telling me. There were so many small things that she had fabricated, truths she had stretched and things she wasn’t self-aware about, the loss simply didn’t sting that much.
The goal of every romantic relationship should be to create a safe haven with your partner where you feel free to be transparent and vulnerable.
As an INFJ, I’m really good at seeing things from another person’s perspective. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t upset at my recent love interest for breaking up with me. She never said it was my weight specifically. She talked around it. She said she didn’t have a physical attraction to me, and that she never felt the strong urge to initiate sex with me. When I asked if it was because of my size, she couldn’t look me in the eye when she said “Yeah, kinda.”
The experience made me really take a second look at how I might present myself I ever try online dating again. When I think about how my previous love interests Kittenfished me, and how it made it so easy for me to drop them, it makes me want to try to be as honest as possible the next time around. And it makes me wonder if that woman in Oregon lost some respect for me the moment she hugged me in the airport. Was I suddenly an unreliable narrator in her eyes?
All in all, over the summer, we spent almost two weeks together. I visited her after we broke up, as a friend. When I look back at who she presented to me via online dating and who she was in real life, the two match up pretty seamlessly. Of course, there were slight differences. She was more of a jokester in real life, but that could have been the nerves. She dressed slightly more masculinely. But that’s it. She was who she was. And I think that’s why it’s been so hard for me to fall out of love with her.
GLAMOUR Magazine posted an article titled “Kittenfishing is the new dating trend doing the rounds, but what exactly is it? And are we guilty of doing it ourselves?” and you can read it here.
NBC News posted an article titled “Kittenfishing: The common dating trend you’re probably (slightly) guilty of” in 2019 and you can find it here.
Lavender Dezare was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Find more stories from her here.
