Under Pressure
Originally sent to subscribers on June 30, 2026.
“What one thing would you change about me, cosmetically?”
It's a question you'd expect from a patient in a plastic surgeon's office, not from a dating game contestant in a bar basement. But that's exactly the source and precisely the location where I heard it a few weeks ago.
I was cohosting a live dating game show modeled after The Dating Game—a show none of the contestants that night, nor their parents, were old enough to have ever seen. Had I referred to The Dating Game onstage, they might rightfully have assumed I was speaking tongue-in-cheek about dating in general—had they known the meaning of tongue-in-cheek. As host, my job was to interview each contestant and then facilitate a question-and-answer segment. The first few questions were lay-ups—what's your sign, what's your body count, how many STD's do you have currently—but this one promised to liven things up.
It's amazing what you can learn about someone when you stick a microphone in their face. Forced to answer a risky question in front of an expectant audience, some people rise to the occasion, while others, frozen, fail to strike out on their own and simply strike out. Others still say the first thing that comes to their minds.
“Let's see what our bachelors have to say,” I said, as I crossed the stage to the three young men seated on barstools.
Bachelor Number One, Chad, was a young man in his mid-20s who works in finance. "I wouldn't change a thing about you, but since I have to choose, I'd say remove your blindfold so we can all see your beautiful eyes." Every guy in the crowd groaned; every girl swooned.
Bachelor Number Two, Brad, was a young man in his mid-20s who works in finance. He was wise enough to avoid the trap but not witty enough to forge onward. “Uhhh…I'd also say…remove the blindfold?”
Safe. Boring. It wasn't a train wreck, but it wasn't going to win him any dates. I moved to Bachelor Number Three.
Tad, a young man in his mid-20s who works in finance, wasted no time answering. “Fake tits.”
Straight from the heart.
Unencumbered by fear, he took a swing. The bachelorette didn't like the answer, so in this case it was a line drive straight to the shortstop. But still, maybe Number Three was the only one who actually answered the question.
Each of the contestants responded differently and in each answer, a truth came out. Pressure strips away the fluff—the unimportant, extra, or performative. Peggy Noonan makes a great point about this in On Speaking Well.
Most of the important things you will ever say or hear in your life [she writes] are composed of simple, good, sturdy words. “I love you.” “It's over.” “It's a boy.” “We're going to win.” “He's dead.” These are the words of big events. Because they are big you speak with utter and unconscious concentration as you communicate them. You unconsciously edit out the extraneous, the unneeded. (When soldiers take a bullet they don't say, “I have been shot,” they say, “I'm hit.”)
“Fake tits,” while crude, is a good, sturdy phrase. It's dense. Plain and direct. There's no equivocation or hedging, no way to compress it without losing the concept or a cup size. I don't know what sort of pressures Tad had been through, but it was enough to strip away everything except an unfiltered answer. Nothing extraneous. Nothing unneeded.
Having asked a superficial question, the bachelorette revealed something genuine. It was time to reveal the winner.
"Do you know who you're choosing?" I asked, making my way back to the bachelorette.
"Oh yeah," she said, grabbing the microphone from my hands. "This one's easy. Number One... you made me laugh.”
