Whether you’re stalking him on Facebook, scrolling through his Instagram account, or spying on his immediate thoughts via Twitter, you need to understand that who your crush/boyfriend/husband/blind date appears to be on social media doesn’t exactly reflect who he is in real life. “It is part of the modern condition to pose and posture online, and it can be very fun to make fun of the various ways in which people make asses of themselves,” says NYMag.com writer Julieanne Smolinski. “But the unfiltered nature and open playing field of social media make it easy to forget that it's all a performance.”

Yep. It’s just not real. Or at least, most of it isn’t.

Because aren’t you also putting on a show when you take 30 selfies only to use one of them in the end with the caption #wokeuplikethis? Or when you update your Facebook page with a really witty caption you saw in a book or on a restaurant menu?

So if you chance upon one guy’s obnoxious selfie in his auto, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a frat-boy wannabe or that if he’s surrounded by women in another that he’s babaero. Give these guys the benefit of the doubt. If he uses poor grammar in his tweets and captions, however, it unfortunately means exactly what you think it does.

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