A rite of passage for online daters is encountering someone who claims to be 49 but, in reality, is 54, 62, or older. This scenario has gone so far as to become a cliché because everyone seems to encounter it at one point or another when dating online. Misleading others on a dating site about age is indeed such a widespread phenomenon that, according to BEDBiBLE.com, 20% of women use older pictures of themselves to look younger and thinner on their profiles. Men, as many of my female clients attest, do the same.

At first thought, this statistic feels disheartening. After all, how can you expect to find love online if basic information such as someone's real age isn't even available to you? Even so, I find this statistic equally fascinating. And, to explain why, let me take you back to what seems like another lifetime ago, before 1991, when online dating wasn't widely available to the public. 

In those days, people typically met each other through friends or at bars. All they had to go on was appearances or being in a shared social circle. The first question that would come out of a suitor's mouth was never, "How old are you?" Proper etiquette dictates never asking someone their age. Instead, people would reveal their age as they dated and got to know each other better.

The landscape today is such that online dating has grown so much in popularity and influence that it is practically unavoidable. On the one hand, online dating opens us up to a host of options we could not have otherwise had, but, paradoxically, closes us off to too many viable options. Dating apps do not allow users to search by age, but the dating sites typically preferable to me, such as Match.com, OkCupid, and JDate, which allow for more description, do. The negative implication? Users will only search for matches within a target age range, meaning men and women, especially over 50, are not included as a potential match for the individuals they want to meet.

Therefore, for the explicit purpose of helping my clients show up in searches so potential matches can find them, I am, in a minimal sense, OK with them lowering their age to fit within the age criteria right beneath their own. I disavow with a passion lying about anything else for any other reason, and I expect my clients to be upfront about their actual age either in the body of their profile or during the first phone call and not a moment later. Here's why.

Dating is like a business. Ultimately, you are advertising yourself to potential "buyers" online. Think of it like this: McDonald's launches ads persuading you to eat their burgers instead of, say, Wendy's. To do this, McDonald's runs persuasive marketing campaigns to reach as many people as they can to sell as many burgers as they can. In business, there are always shades of gray. Anyone who has eaten fast food in real life knows that fast food burgers do not resemble in every detail their advertised counterparts. But many people eat and enjoy them anyway.

Increasing the chances of meeting compatible matches means maximizing the number of people who encounter your profile. As a professional matchmaker utilizing online dating as a tool, I can help you strategize and market yourself and do precisely that. The problem is if no one sees your profile in the first place, I will never have the opportunity.

To circumvent the constraint of not showing up as a potential match, I maintain that the specific case of altering your age for what is, to a viewer, a brief moment in time is permissible on sites employing it as a categorization only because the cutoffs can be so arbitrary. But just as McDonald's does not explicitly lie about its food, you should not lie about your identity. Ever. You are a burger, so own it. There are ethical business practices and unethical business practices. Lying is always wrong. 

Because the purpose of changing your age is solely to have you appear in more searches, I again reiterate how important it is you disclose your real age either in the body of your profile summary or during your first phone call, so that your matches can make an informed decision about whether they would like to meet you. You don't want to waste anybody's time; to do so would put you in the wrong by default. Not to mention, your time is equally as valuable.

Dating is a business like any other. And the bottom line is to achieve your end goal, whatever it may be. That means first understanding your marketplace – including online dating – and the algorithm that underlies it, which may mean temporarily altering your age. 

Fortunately, with a skilled, experienced matchmaker, you won't need to get into all of this nitty-gritty. Leave that to me, and I will help improve your analytics while ultimately marketing you for you. Remember, the truth always comes out in the end, the most important aspect of which is how much you have to offer.