Two years. That's all I knocked off. Not vanity — strategy. Those profiles get filtered by hard age cutoffs, and I was landing just on the wrong side of a lot of them. Two years younger and suddenly I existed in a whole bunch more searches. So, adjustment made.
It worked. Got matched, got married, forgot the whole thing.
Then years later a screenshot of the old profile surfaces — saved, of all places, on his cousin's phone. My husband sees it, does the math, and loses it. Ten full minutes of laughing. Not even mad, just delighted, like he'd uncovered state secrets.
Now it's a permanent bit at family functions. Someone always finds a way to bring up "the real age" with a grin. I've stopped fighting it. You commit a small crime, you serve a lifetime sentence of gentle roasting.