If it seems like a lot of those people you meet through online dating services aren't being, um, entirely truthful about their age, weight, etc., it's not that you're having bad luck. A researcher from Cornell University's department of communication studied 80 online daters from New York City and found that fully 81% lied in their profiles about their height, weight, or age, or a combination of these.

The good news is that the lies in general were not outrageous lies--but were not innocent mistakes either. The team of researcher Jeffrey Hancock said that, "participants balanced the tension between appearing as attractive as possible while also being perceived as honest."

The study appears in April's edition of Proceedings of Computer/Human Interactions. The subjects studied were evenly split between men and women, and had posted profiles on at Match.com, Yahoo Personals, American Singles, or Webdate.

The research found that weight was the most common subject that daters fibbed about, followed by height and age. Women tended to report their weight as lower than it actually was; men tended to report their height was taller than it was.

The daters generally knew they hadn't told the truth, the research found. And their online profiles in general wasn't too drastically different from reality, perhaps because the dates knew that any extremely inaccurate claim would be immediately apparent upon meeting someone in person.

Hancock noted that there were a few real whoppers among the information the daters gave, though--including profiles that claimed "a 35-pound difference, a three-inch height difference, or an 11-year age difference from reality."