A Real Story

After two dates in a row where the guy looked nothing like his photos, I made myself a rule: no in-person meeting until we’d done a video call through the app first. Bumble had just rolled out its in-app video chat, so when I matched with Derek — golf trip photos, a golden retriever named Biscuit, a job title that sounded impressively vague — I asked him straight up if he’d hop on a call before we picked a restaurant. He agreed fast, which I took as a good sign.

The call itself started fine. Good lighting, decent small talk about his job in ‘consulting.’ But about ten minutes in I asked him something dumb and specific: what kind of food Biscuit was picky about, since my own dog is a nightmare eater. He laughed a beat too long, glanced down and to the side like he was scrolling something, then said ‘oh, he eats basically anything,’ which is not an answer anyone gives about a real dog they own. I asked one more follow-up about a photo of him at a lake house and he got cagey about where it even was.

I ended the call politely, said I had somewhere to be, and blocked him within the hour. A few weeks later a friend doing her own app-scrolling sent me a screenshot of the exact same golf-trip photo under a completely different name and job title. So the guy either wasn’t who he said he was, or was running more than one profile — either way, the video call is what surfaced it, not the messages, which had been totally normal and even a little charming.

I’m not saying a five-minute video chat makes you a lie detector, because it doesn’t — plenty of genuinely nice people are awkward on camera, and plenty of bad actors are smooth on it too. But it gave me one real, unscripted moment where his story had to hold up live, and it didn’t. I still do a video call before every first date now. It’s saved me at least one bad night, maybe worse, and that’s enough for me to keep doing it.