The Luv Doc: Fake Dude

Dear Luv Doc,

My best friend since high school is dating a guy who seems really fake. Whenever me and my boyfriend go out with them as a couple he is always just a little too overdressed, like he thought too hard about it – and he always smells like some expensive cologne. When we went to the Salt Lick a few weekends ago he wore a cowboy hat, flip-flops, Ralph Lauren cargos, a really loud floral print, and very expensive Ray-Bans. He's a lawyer, but he drives a really old Ford Bronco he is supposedly "restoring" that doesn't have working air conditioning, so my friend always has to drive him everywhere. Whenever we are talking about normal stuff like our jobs, or restaurants, or what we're watching on Netflix, he always quotes some random philosopher or book that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. He doesn't eat bread. He won't drink beer out of a can, and he knows too much about wines for a guy in his 20s. It all just seems so pretentious for someone who says he grew up in Lubbock. Even so, my boyfriend actually likes him, and my best friend thinks he hung the moon, but I don't trust someone who seems so inauthentic dating my bestie. Am I wrong to be suspicious of him? I liked all of her previous boyfriends, but this one just seems too unreal.  – Suspicious Mind

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I got your back – at least on that Ford Bronco restoration project. That's a fool's errand – especially if it's a Bronco II. He might as well be restoring a '71 Pinto – arguably the ugliest car ever built until it was eclipsed by the AMC Pacer. Look, Tarantino can wax nostalgic all he wants about the 1970s, but I was actually there, and it was a demoralizing shitshow, start to finish. The AMC Pacer wasn't even the tip of that turd mound decade that brought us polyester leisure suits, tube socks, greasy hair, smooth jazz, ditch weed, and mustard as a color. My sincerest apologies for all the people in nursing homes reading this column who felt they peaked in the 1970s, but the absolute kindest assessment of that decade would be "disastrously experimental." Am I willing to concede that some good things came out of the Seventies? Yes, but they weren't enough to redeem the decade as a whole – sort of in the same way that Volkswagen Beetles don't redeem National Socialism.

Anyway, with the exception of the Bronco restoration project, wearing flip-flops in a restaurant that isn't immediately adjacent to a large body of water (I'm looking at you, Billy from Criquet), and of course, the lawyer thing, this dude sounds sort of awesome. Maybe you could text me his digits ... or at least his Insta profile? Like, seriously, who doesn't want to hang out with somebody who dresses nice, knows a lot about wines, and also smells good? Apparently he is a reader as well? Who quotes philosophers? Wow, what a sketchy de-hewsh.

Also, there is the one thing I am absolutely certain about when it comes to Texas: A cowboy hat is always appropriate attire – preferably a straw one that was impulse-purchased in a run-down, South Asian-owned convenience store. That Labor Day to Memorial Day straw hat moratorium is just a bunch of Yankee bullshit – especially here in Texas where summer ends on Halloween and begins whenever the temperature exceeds 100, which has happened as early as January. Calling someone out for wearing a cowboy hat at a barbecue restaurant named "The Salt Lick" is just drippin' ... with irony ... unless it's one of those flat-brimmed monstrosities favored by Instagram influencers, Brooklynites, and condo dwellers. I mean, goddamn it, they have a hat steamer right there at the Boot Barn.

That said, people who bang on about "authenticity" annoy me. They seem to think that anyone not presenting an easily digestible, unintimidatingly homogeneous, one-dimensional self-image is somehow being fake. Could it be that some people are intellectually developed enough to cultivate an incongruous variety of interests that may not dovetail with a simple-minded worldview? I'd like to think so. It's much more suspicious to me when someone seems unbelievably one-dimensional – like they're curating the image they want me to see. And of course, if they're not ... yeesh ... that sounds like a lot of fun. So, stay frosty if you want, but this Lubbock fellow seems like someone you should want to get to know better.