Your Dating Profile Is Why You're Not Getting Dates

Your profile is your dating resume.

You would not hand an employer a resume that talked about your hobbies and your favorite tacos and how much you love your mom. You would talk about what you bring to the job. Somehow men understand this completely in one context and abandon it entirely in the other.

This is not your Instagram. It is not a highlight reel and it is not a place to look cool for your friends. You are presenting yourself as a dating applicant. That is the actual job of the thing, and most men are doing something else with it entirely and then wondering why the matches do not come.

I am going to tell you exactly what gets you swiped left on, because I have looked at thousands of these and I can call it in about three seconds.

What actually makes me swipe left

Your bio shows me exactly how you are showing up.

That is the whole thing, and everything below is a version of it. Your profile is never neutral, and it is never blank even when it is empty. It is already telling me how seriously you are taking this, how much effort you have in you, and what your level of investment looks like before anyone has spent a dollar or an evening.

If this is how you show up here, where the stakes are zero and you have unlimited time to think about it, I have every reason to believe it is also how you will show up on a Tuesday night when it costs you something.

Your photos are just as important as your bio.

You with other women. I do not know who she is. I do not know what she is to you. I am not going to spend my afternoon working it out, and you have made your first impression a question I did not want to answer.

Group shots where I cannot tell which one is you. You have five friends and I have three seconds. Do the math on that. Group photos are fine in the mix, they just cannot be the first one and they cannot be all of them.

Photos with a woman's face scribbled out or cropped or emoji'd over. You have told me there is an ex, that you are still carrying the photo, and that you thought this was a reasonable solution. That is three pieces of information and none of them help you.

Flipping off the camera. I understand you think this is playful. It reads as hostile to whoever is looking, and the person looking is me.

Anything where you look bored, annoyed, or above it. Disinterest is not mystery. It is just disinterest, and I will take you at your word.

Photos that are not of you. Your car. Your dog alone. A sunset. A meme. A fish. I am not dating the fish.

What actually works

Smile. In an actual photo of your actual face. It is not complicated and it is stunning how few men do it.

Take off the sunglasses. Take off the hat. In every single photo, sunglasses and a hat, and then you show up to the date and I am meeting a stranger. You are not wearing sunglasses and a hat all the time. Show me the face I am going to be sitting across from.

Show me you doing something. Your hobbies. Your dog. Hiking. Playing something, building something, being somewhere. Not because the activity impresses me, but because it gives me a picture of a life and it gives me something to talk to you about.

And your bio has to do its own work.

Give me something to lean into

When I message a man first, it is almost always because I found something in his profile I could lean into.

You said you like EDM. I love EDM. Now I have a way in, I have something we share, and I have a conversation that starts somewhere real instead of with "hey." One line in your bio did that.

Now compare that to the blank profile. No bio, or a bio that says "ask me anything," or four words that tell me nothing. I know literally nothing about you. And what that communicates, whether you intended it or not, is that you are an empty vessel, and I am immediately and completely disinterested.

You did not give me anything to work with. So I do not work.

Put actual things in there. What you do, what you are into, what your weekends look like, what you are looking for. Not a personality test. Three or four specific things a human being could respond to. That is the entire bar and most men cannot clear it because being specific requires being a little exposed, and men are, on the whole, terrible at being open.

That is the real problem underneath all of this. Not photo quality. Not the algorithm. Men have been trained that vulnerability is a liability, so they build profiles that give away nothing, and then they cannot understand why nobody is interested in nothing.

Filters

If you are using filters, I am not swiping.

Not because of how you look. Because of what it tells me about how you feel about how you look. A man smoothing his face in a photo is telling me his confidence is not where it needs to be, and that is going to show up in every other part of this.

That applies to women too. It is not a men's problem, it is a confidence problem. But men seem to think nobody can tell, and everybody can tell.

What happens after the match

The profile gets you the match. Then you find new ways to lose it.

It starts with your opener, and your opener is not "hi."

Do you want to be one of a hundred, or do you want to be the one in a hundred? Because "hi" is one of a hundred. It arrives in a stack of identical messages and it dies in that stack, and the man who sent it will tell his friends the apps do not work.

Give her something. Make her blush, make her laugh, make her sit with a line for a second before she answers. A joke. An actual observation about something in her profile. One good sentence. Those are the men I write back to, every time, and it is not close.

Because here is what "hi" actually tells me. It tells me the only effort you have in you is the effort it took to swipe. You saw something you liked and you could not be bothered to spend thirty seconds on it. If that is what you have at the stage where you are supposed to be trying, I already know what the third month looks like.

Effort is sexy. That is not a soft observation, it is the whole mechanism. Effort is the single most attractive thing available to you at this stage and it is free.

And yes, dating online is exhausting. Dating in general is exhausting. Nobody is arguing with you about that. But it is the job you signed up for, and you do not get to sign up for the job and then refuse to do it. If you are not willing to put in effort, do not participate. Delete the app. There is no shame in that.

But if you are going to be in here, show up as your most attractive self, because that is what the dating sphere is asking of you and everyone else is being asked the same thing.

Then there are the other ways men lose it.

Your response time is information. Not because I am timing you. Because how quickly and how consistently you engage tells me what kind of attention you are capable of.

How fast you turn it sexual. If you are steering toward sex in the first hour, you have told me what this is. You may be right that I will eventually want that conversation. You are wrong about when.

How fast you try to get off the app. Men treat the app like an obstacle to clear rather than a place where something can actually happen. You can build genuine chemistry through an app. I have. If you are pushing hard for my number before I have any read on you, I am going to hesitate, because I am not handing over my phone number to find out whether you can hold my attention. That is what the messages are for.

A swipe is not a contract

Here is the part that men get wrong more than anything else on this list.

A swipe means there is a surface-level mutual attraction. That is it. That is step one of a process that has a lot more steps, and it obligates neither of us to anything.

Step two is that you actually have to build something. And if you are not willing to build, you are not worth the investment, and neither is anyone who is not willing to build with you.

Nobody owes anybody a date, a phone number, a conversation, or a reason, inside the first fifteen minutes or ever, just because two people tapped the same direction. You do not owe it and she does not owe it. The swipe is permission to start. It is not an agreement about where it ends.

Which is good news, because it means the pressure you are putting on the first three messages is pressure you invented.

Do this today

Open your profile right now and go through it as though you are someone else.

Delete every photo with another woman in it. Delete the sunglasses, the hat, the middle finger, the fish. Keep the group shot if you want one, but never as your first photo and never as the only kind you have. Put in one clear photo of your face, smiling, no filter. Put in two photos of you doing something you actually do.

Then write three sentences about who you are that a stranger could respond to. Specific ones. Name the music, name the sport, name the thing you do on Sundays.

That is fifteen minutes of work and it will do more for your results than a year at the gym.

Your profile is never neutral, and it is never blank even when it is empty.

You are not getting passed over because of your face. You are getting passed over because you gave her nothing to say yes to.

Common questions about dating profiles

Why am I not getting matches on dating apps?

Usually because the profile gives nothing to respond to. A profile is never neutral, and an empty bio still communicates a level of effort and seriousness. Common killers include photos with other women, unidentifiable group shots, sunglasses and hats in every image, filters, and a bio with no specifics.

What should a man put in his dating bio?

Three or four specific things a stranger could respond to. Name the music, the sport, the thing you do on Sundays. Specificity gives the other person somewhere to start a conversation, which is how most first messages actually get written.

What should my first message be after matching?

Not hi. An opener should give the other person something to react to, whether that is a joke, a line, or a specific observation about their profile. A generic greeting communicates that swiping was the entire extent of the effort available.

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