His Profile Is Immaculate. Please Don’t Open the Closet Yet

Online dating asks human beings to perform one rather ambitious task: summarize themselves attractively.

Naturally, we rise to the occasion.

Everybody is adventurous, emotionally intelligent, fond of travel and strangely devoted to hiking. Men who spend most weekends horizontally acquainted with a sofa appear online beside waterfalls, everyone loves laughter, nobody enjoys unnecessary drama, and half the population is apparently searching for its “best friend,” although one suspects the best friend will also need to be attractive, available and delighted by kayaking.

It all looks very promising, and somewhere behind every polished little profile sits a closet full of skeletons.

Not necessarily sinister skeletons, either. Most are ordinary, respectable skeletons with good manners: old heartbreaks, peculiar habits, inconvenient fears, unfinished stories, strange relationship patterns and the occasional ex who has technically left but still seems to receive mail there.

None of this appears under About Me, of course.

Imagine the chaos.

The Closet Is Not Part of the Tour

A dating profile shows you what a person would like you to know before you know anything else, which is perfectly reasonable because nobody has ever begun a romance by saying, “Before you become attracted to me, perhaps we should review the material in the back.”

So you get the lovely photograph, the charming paragraph, the interests, the dog, the beach and the excellent smile, while the skeletons remain respectfully behind the door.

And because the door is closed, imagination becomes very helpful.

A blank space appears and the mind fills it beautifully. He says he wants a relationship, so naturally he must be good at having one; he says communication matters, so presumably he communicates; he describes himself as easygoing, which sounds delightful until several months later you discover that “easygoing” sometimes means he would prefer never to discuss anything that causes even mild discomfort.

The profile did not exactly deceive you.

It simply left several drawers unopened.

Skeletons Are Surprisingly Patient

The funny thing about getting to know someone is that the skeletons rarely rush; they understand timing.

The first few dates are much too early for a full parade, so everybody behaves nicely. The difficult habits stay home, the odd little reactions remain folded away, and even emotional baggage seems to understand that now is not the moment.

Then comfort arrives, and one small skeleton appears.

Nothing alarming, perhaps even endearing, so you think, Well, everybody has something.

Correct.

Then another strolls out, followed by another, and at some point you realize the closet has depth.

This is not necessarily bad news. A man without a single skeleton would be far more suspicious because what has he been doing all these years, living in protective packaging?

The question was never whether there would be skeletons. The question is whether you can live peacefully with the particular collection that eventually emerges.

Some are harmless little things you barely notice.

Others have apparently formed a jazz ensemble.

Profiles Are Excellent at the Wrong Information

Online dating gives you an extraordinary amount of information before meeting someone and almost none of the information that will eventually matter.

You can learn that he likes sushi, skiing, Portugal, Labradors and live music, which is all perfectly pleasant, but nobody has created a cheerful little profile box asking:

What happens when you don’t get your way?

Or perhaps:

How strange do you become when you are emotionally uncomfortable?

And while we are improving things:

Please describe your relationship with accountability in 150 characters or fewer.

Now that would be useful.

Instead, we know he visited Barcelona in 2024.

Dating profiles are beautifully efficient at describing the decorative parts of a person, while relationships eventually introduce you to the machinery—and the machinery is always more interesting.

The Skeletons Were There Before You Arrived

When the closet finally opens, women sometimes look at the contents and wonder what they did to create them, which may be the most unnecessary question in the room.

You did not manufacture his complicated relationship with closeness during appetizers, nor did you personally install the unresolved ex. That strange habit of disappearing whenever emotions become inconvenient was almost certainly not assembled during your third date.

The skeletons came with the house.

You simply received the tour later.

This is why online dating can feel so bewildering: you meet someone at the exact moment his presentation is most compressed, polished and charming, then gradually discover the enormous human being attached to it.

Of course there are surprises. Six photographs and a paragraph were never going to contain an entire man.

Eventually, the Door Opens

Time is terribly indiscreet, and given enough of it, the beautiful profile begins acquiring context.

You see the man when he is tired, disappointed, annoyed, uncertain, comfortable, bored and no longer trying quite so hard to make an entrance, and slowly the closet opens.

Sometimes you look inside and think, Oh. Is that all? A few boxes, some history, one embarrassing jacket—lovely.

Sometimes the door opens and three skeletons fall forward, another waves from the back, and something upstairs appears to be playing a trumpet.

Ah.

That explains a few things.

Perhaps that is online dating in its purest form: you begin with a beautifully arranged preview and then spend the next several months discovering what was not included in the photograph.

Nobody necessarily lied, and nobody necessarily intended a surprise; a human being simply turned out to contain considerably more than six pictures and a fondness for brunch.

The profile was lovely.

The closet just had the rest of him in it.