LinkedIn Dating

A young friend forwarded me a screenshot from LinkedIn last week: a man's opening DM to her, "Loved your take on B2B lead gen, would love to connect and hear more about your journey." She said it took her a few minutes to realize he was flirting with her, and that this had nothing to do with any interest in hiring her.

Apparently this is a trend these days. People are vetting future partners through their LinkedIn profiles instead of Tinder bios, on the flawed premise that a résumé tells you more about a person than a beach photo does. I understand the impulse to seek a more vetted source of information about a potential date, but LinkedIn might fail to deliver for romance the same way it has for hiring. Just because LinkedIn is verified and plausibly tied to an employer doesn't mean lying is any harder there. I know people who list their last place of employment as current, years after they've left, because whatever they've been doing since isn't worth mentioning.

It's just as easy to fake on LinkedIn, just different things than what one might fake on Hinge or Tinder. We're all familiar with the three-month data-entry internship rebranded as "spearheading enterprise information architecture," written by the same species of person who once told a Hinge date that his one-bedroom above a laundromat was a "curated urban retreat." The scale of the exaggeration is identical. Only the vocabulary is different, laundered through corporate speak.