How Much Information Should We Look Up Before a Date?

When a friend mentions someone to us, when we’re preparing to meet someone in person, when we chat with a match, when someone wants to introduce us to a friend, the first thing we tend to do is look them up on social media. "Let me see a photo," we say. We sift through mutual friends, look at tags, search (incognito) on LinkedIn, cross-check the data—things that were nearly impossible to do a few decades ago. In dating especially, the habit of checking who we’ll be meeting and imagining what they’ll be like is extremely widespread.Today, the moment we manage to find out someone's name, we can also know the people they hang out with, what year they graduated and perhaps even in what industry, we can see whether they have brothers or sisters and whether they’re really as tall as their Tinder profile claims. The "Google test," which includes search engines and social media profiles, is quite common: a benevolent form of "stalking" and a harmless one in which we have developed remarkable soft skills.Some time ago, in an interview with INSIDER, relationship expert Susan Winter argued that, "You shouldn’t be ashamed if you’ve Googled the name of the person you’re dating, because it’s a fairly common practice. And it becomes even more frequent when you start to like someone after the first date. You want to verify their identity." But where is the limit?A matter of safetyLooking up additional information about a person met online is a practice that is not only widespread, but also useful for ensuring your own safety. According to a study by Norton, a leading cybersecurity and antivirus company that recently published the Cyber Safety Insight Report, one in four users has been the victim of a romance scam.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.In 2025, online searches for "Tinder scams" increased by 27%, and 53% of Tinder users say they cannot distinguish a real photo from one generated with AI. We know that what we see in a dating profile does not always correspond to reality and, for this reason, we are now used to protecting ourselves. "The risk arises from information asymmetry," explained Eli Carosi, an expert in scams and cybersecurity. "The person who creates the profile controls the narrative; the person viewing it has limited tools to verify its authenticity. It can be a creative tool to get noticed, or the lever for building false identities, including credible deepfake images."This has given rise to various practices that help us regain control over what we’re getting into. Nobody wants to risk ending up in a scam, finding themselves in front of a person who does not correspond at all to how they presented themselves, or even wasting time. For example, Sabrina Zohar, a dating coach who hosts a podcast about relationships, told the New York Times that she is a big supporter of a pre-date video call or phone call. It’s a way to hear the person’s voice and get an idea of their body language. At the end of some conversations, Zohar says she has thought: "Thank God I didn’t go out with this person. What a disappointment!” or “Wow, on the phone he’s much nicer. He simply doesn’t like texting.”A matter of controlAccording to Scott Valdez, founder and president of ViDA, a service that helps clients find their soulmate online, gathering information before a date can also be useful. “Sometimes, researching someone online before meeting them can save you from a dead-end date,” he explains to Bustle, and yet there is also the other side of the coin.Looking up online anyone we meet or are about to meet is also a matter of control. Today we never go to a restaurant without first checking the menu online and the comments on TripAdvisor, we don’t buy anything without reading reviews from other users, and we go on vacation to places we’ve already seen on Instagram. The same goes for people: we like not being caught unprepared, but in doing so we lose the spark of unpredictability and the possibility of wonder. According to Valdez, we risk leaving behind “a fundamental piece of the puzzle.” “When you scroll through someone’s social profiles before getting to know them,” he says, “you don’t have the benefit of filtering what you see through the lens of a pre-existing relationship,” and so you create a mental image that may be reassuring, but is not necessarily truthful. We struggle to let ourselves go because it means not knowing exactly how things will turn out or who is really in front of us, but there is no other way to fall in love.