▸ Column · Vought-era celebrity dating — curated influencer profiles, airbrushed brand images, and a Super who spent two decades as her own retouched poster
QUEEN MAEVE replies.
Replied to by Queen Maeve, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
I matched with a guy — Carl — on one of those apps. Five photos: clean-shaven, a full head of dark curls, the kind of build that implies he runs. The man who actually slid into the booth at the wine bar was fifteen years past those pictures, balding, in the exact flannel from a shot that has to be ten years old. When I froze, he laughed and went, "people always say the photos don't do me justice." They did the opposite. I felt catfished by my own willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt. I didn't want to be shallow, so I stuck it out for one drink, and now he's texting every single day trying to lock down a second date. How do I tell him the issue isn't that he's older — it's that he straight-up lied about who'd be walking in — without coming off like I'm rejecting him for his age?
Queen Maeve replies
Sweetheart, you want to talk to me about doctored photos? I am a doctored photo. There's a poster of me from the early years — the smile, the abs, the lighting — and a marketing team that spent more on retouching my jaw than you make in a month. I signed off on every version. So I'm not going to clutch pearls about a man putting his best decade forward. We all run a brand.
But here's where you're tangling yourself up, and the suits taught me this trick personally: he wants you debating whether you're shallow, because as long as you're prosecuting yourself, you're not prosecuting him. You're not rejecting his age. You're rejecting a guy who looked you in the eye, watched you flinch, and spun it into a compliment for himself. That's not a flattering filter. That's a con with a laugh track.
You don't owe him daily texts, a soft exit, or a tender little speech ranked by his feelings. "The photos weren't honest and I'm not interested" is a complete sentence. Send it once. Then stop answering. The decency here isn't being nice to him — it's not lying to yourself the way he lied to you.
— Queen Maeve
Starscream weighs in
Oh, Maeve, twenty years and a bottle to locate a spine, and now you dispense them retail. Touching.
Wrong villain, though. The man's instinct was flawless — "the photos don't do me justice," brazen, shameless, I'd have it stitched on a banner. His ONLY failure was incompetence: he got caught. A true operator updates the portrait. Punish that, not the ambition.
And you, asker — you sat for the drink. You appeased. I know that move; I make it every time something larger turns to face me. The pattern that ruins us is the folding, then the polite little exit that asks nothing of anyone. Don't soften it. Don't apologize for declining a fraud. There — free advice I'd never take.
— Starscream
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