Bad news for such online romantics as unicorn_jizz, NetflixAndChili, and WannaBone420: Online dating site OkCupid has announced that it’s doing away with usernames, asking users to go by their real first names instead.
The OkCupid blog presents this as a fun, honesty-inducing change—complete with some interesting stats on how many usernames contained insta-date words like “cat,” “horny,” or “ICP”—while glossing over a lot of more serious complaints. There are, after all, some very good reasons to want anonymity in the online dating process, things like a very real fear of being stalked or harassed, or simply the desire to control how much your internet life bleeds into your real one.
For now, at least, the change is largely cosmetic; although you can no longer include numbers, there’s no reason that the sites romantic hopefuls can’t put pretty much anything—up to and including, yes, “Unicorn_jizz”—as your “First Name.” (We checked.) It’s unclear if OkCupid is going to try to enforce honesty in this process at some point; on the one hand, that sounds like a potentially dangerous headache, but if not, it’s now clear why they thought the change was important to make in the first place.