L.A. Affairs: Her online date isn’t the man he used to be

Dating in Los Angeles is exhausting. At a certain point, this Westside girl realized that it didn’t matter how hot the model/actor/writer/bartender was — I was sick of driving to K-town, Sherman Oaks and Silver Lake. I opened an OkCupid account, had my friend Marissa edit it to make me sound less cynical and set the distance range at five miles.

One day, Kevin popped up as a potential match. He was exactly my type: sexy and athletic, but also smart, political and a good conversationalist. Better yet, he lived a couple of miles away in Santa Monica. In his pictures, he had a nice smile. We started chatting on the site and hit it off, eventually moving to emails and text. It didn’t raise any red flags when he delayed meeting me; he told me he was away on business in Chicago, and that seemed perfectly reasonable.

Kevin was engaging. He seemed open and honest, and we seemed to have a lot in common. We exchanged pictures back and forth, and he sent some with his parents, on exotic vacations and camping trips. After three weeks of increasingly intense texting back and forth, he was back and ready to meet. He chose the top floor of the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. The open-air garden deck was the perfect place to drink tea and get to know each other.

It’s not a terribly large space. It houses a small bar and some tables, most of which were occupied by professionals holding meetings. When I didn’t see him, I walked toward the pool area and gave him a call. He told me to come back to the bar area where he was waiting. I did, and a man I had previously dismissed because he looked nothing like the person whose pictures I’d seen, rose from a table, called my name and offered me an awkward hug. As we sat down he launched immediately into what he thought was a hilarious anecdote about how a random girl, also there to meet a first date, had mistakenly sat down a few minutes prior, thinking she was meeting with him.

I sat in incredulous silence, trying not to cry. After a minute or so of his yammering, I realized he had no intention of addressing the only thing I wanted to know about.

“So …,” I started, “you are definitely not the same guy in the pictures.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk to you about that in person.” Kevin seemed slightly uncomfortable but not particularly contrite.

I’m not often without words, and I’m by no means a dating newbie, but I can definitively say that this is the first time in my dating career that I’ve been “catfished.” I wanted to understand why someone would go to the trouble, but as he explained, his blasé attitude made me sick to my stomach. He admitted to stealing the pictures off the Internet. The narratives that went along with them were undoubtedly fake too. I was disgusted and enraged, but I had the foresight to demand that he hand over his phone. We sat in awkward silence for 10 long minutes as I deleted every text, every picture, every email I’d ever sent him.

I briefly considered tossing his phone off the ledge of the hotel, but I didn’t know what was down below, and I didn’t want anyone to incur injuries. Instead, I handed it back and looked him dead in the eyes. I felt as though I was explaining something complicated to a small child, but I work with some very bright, empathetic children, so perhaps it’s an unfair comparison.

“I don’t know how you could possibly believe that this was an acceptable way for an adult to behave,” I said. “Did you somehow think that I would come here and continue on a date and not say anything? You’re a terrible person. You can’t treat people this way.”

Kevin tried to explain how it all started as a social experiment that had gotten out of hand, but I stopped him. Maybe I’ve watched too much “SVU,” but I sensed from his flat, even affect that this was something he’d done before, though he insisted he hadn’t. I got up and made my way to the elevator in a daze. I cried tears of rage and exhaustion in that elevator.

Later, I reverse-image searched the pictures he’d sent me. No results. I contacted OkCupid and had Kevin’s account shut down. I shuttered mine and haven’t logged in since. A lawyer friend of mine had the private investigator on his staff trace his phone number; it came back to a burner phone. No surprise there. Suffice to say, the experience did little to quell my cynicism, although it does make for an interesting anecdote to tell at parties, which is more than I can say of most first dates.

Zapata is a writer/activist/multi-hyphenate living and working on the Westside.

L.A. Affairs chronicles dating and romance in contemporary Southern California. Past columns and submission guidelines are at latimes.com/laaffairs. If you have comments or a true story to tell, write us at home@latimes.com.