Stop acting like you don’t know your Tinder date’s last name

Modern dating means not having to say you're savvy.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran the headline "The New Dating No-No: Asking for a Last Name." Essentially, the article detailed how asking a date's last name has become a milestone in a relationship that started online. It's operating off of the principle that Tinder, Bumble, OK Cupid, and other dating apps only offer a person's first name, and it's only through getting to know a person that the question of a last name becomes a sign post to the future.

But this isn't exactly how things work. It's actually a lot more interesting because most everyone already knows their date's last name, they just have to wait for the right time to acknowledge it.

Some online daters definitely prefer to go into their meet-ups with as little information as possible, but many want to do a little googling in advance. I do it, and, in fact, I would encourage all online daters do it to ensure they know the person they've swiped is the person they're meeting.

Using information you get from their profile or from chatting with them, you can usually find enough scraps of their online presence to know if this person is legit.

This invariably means that nine times out of 10, you're going to learn their last name and a whole lot more about them. In many cases it means both parties are pretending like they haven't dug deep and haven't seen that trip you took to Rome or that weird facial hair thing you tried one time

Within respectable limits, there's nothing wrong with double-checking the veracity of a person's profile You're making sure they aren't lying about their name, posing with Confederate flags, or wearing socks with sandals. It's a useful tool!

(Obviously, there's a fine line between checking someone out and being a creep. It can get really icky really quickly when you do a deep dive into a stranger's social media.)

The difficulty comes in once you're actually on the date when you have to navigate how much you reveal about your pre-date searching. It can be more than a little awkward to acknowledge within minutes of meeting someone that you've found their weird backlit family pictures or know that their cat once helped them do yoga. It's even worse if the other person has done less searching or none at all.

But even if you've only performed some basic, non-creepy searching, you still might feel creepy bringing it up. It's really hard to know if it'll make the other person uncomfortable. You're meeting a stranger, and the last first impression you want to give is that your a stalker-y weirdo.

The odds are, however, that both of you know things about each other, including your last names, but can't exactly bring it up.

And so the dance begins.

I have personally been in this position multiple times. Last fall, for example, I matched with someone on Tinder, and soon after we decided to meet up. I knew her last name from a brief search. We ended up dating for a bit, and it took a while before full identities were discussed. A few weeks into dating, she showed me something on her Facebook, and I found it the perfect opportunity to point at her name and say, "So, that's your last name." It was a silly move, sure, but I felt weird about knowing and not "officially" knowing.

I, like many others, was caught in a good ol' fashioned catch-22. You don't want to bring up that you've searched, but you also don't want to be caught unawares of whom, exactly, you are meeting.

That's basically the reality of modern dating for most of us. Finding the right moment to bring up what you know IRL can be difficult.

So next time someone asks you for your last name, maybe, just maybe, they really just want out of their own self-inflicted awkwardness.