Deceiving Profile Pictures

Social Networking has allowed us to tweak not only our personalities, but also certain undesirable features associated with our looks.  Who needs to go to the gym, eat healthy and/or get plastic surgery when you can just go online and virtually erase all of your flaws.  Once again, I am talking about that security shield we seem to hide behind when we communicate online.  This time I want to explore this theory with the use of online profile pictures.

Is it safe to say that the majority of us are more inclined to put up pictures that are more flattering of ourselves online? Yes, of course it is... why would you put up a picture that you look completely horrible in.  However, you also don't want to put up pictures that make you look too good, especially if you are just putting up one.  I never really thought of this until my friend told me her experience of meeting her online friend in person.  He only had two pictures up on his profile, and he looked really good in both of them, but when she met him in person she was somewhat disappointed.  This was not because he wasn't good looking but because he set the bar pretty high in his profile.  So in person he just didn't measure up.

Or in extreme cases you have people that completely change the way they look online which does not represent what they look like in person at all.  One lady said she had been talking to this guy for about 2 months before meeting him.  She thought she knew him pretty well, and from what she thought,  they had a lot in common.  His picture portrayed him to be youthful, athletic, and handsome, but when she met him in person she could not believe her eyes.  She was sitting in a coffee shop waiting for her date, when this 300 lb man came up to her and introduced himself as the person she had been waiting for.  Needless to say the issue was not necessarily about his weight, but instead about the fact that he portrayed his image to be something quite different than what it actually was.

So the lesson here is that no matter how tempting it is to cover up our insecurities, we must not mislead individuals to perceive us as something we are not.  Whether we do it by accident or on purpose, this masking of our own identities will not help anyone in finding someone they are compatible with.  We must remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if we accept ourselves for exactly who we are, and what we look like then someone will surely see the beauty in that.  

-Dana