How I created my dating profile pt. 2
As detailed in Part 1, I had picked my pictures are was ready to tackle the About Me section. Here was my chance to really express my personality to people, so I knew I had to make it memorable. But I wanted to convey the right amount of information about myself. I didn’t want to list things like I was filling out an online mail-order bride form, nor did I want to drone on and bore anyone who read it (like this blog). Steve Jobs always said that in his speeches he would tell three stories, so I stuck to that principle: I would tell three things about myself that I thought would show who I was.
So what did I want to say about myself? No need to unpack all my insecurities here or anything but I wanted to at least mention some degree of nerdiness.
To nerd or not to nerd…
Or let’s unpack them all now, sure. Basically, I was terrified of how nerdy I was supposed to look here (yes, clearly there is some deep trauma and insecurity that I still hold on to from my past). I knew I was nerdy, I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to push out a huge “I am a nerd” as my main point. If I didn’t address it at all though, I just kept having this fear of months down the line someone saying “wow, I wish you’d told me how nerdy you were at the start!” An absolute nightmare for me.
So I wanted to thread the needle on how to show that I was a bit nerdy, without saying something like “I am a dungeon master in four campaigns” or “I have a collection of dozens of intense strategy board games that take hours to learn, let alone play.” It’s not that these things weren’t true, it’s just that I wanted to be inviting with my nerdiness, not alienating. What if someone had no idea what I was talking about, but they were interested otherwise? I figured just hinting at being a nerd would be enough to invite a larger exploration down the road if they were interested.
That would be my first point. Next, I would need to balance it out with something non-nerdy. According to years of 80’s movies, I knew that the opposite of a nerd was, of course, a jock. I do truly love hockey (but often in a nerdy statistics and data-oriented way! You can’t contain this nerdiness!), so I figured I would mention that. I play hockey pretty regularly so I could show an interest of mine and also convey that I was relatively active. But most importantly to me, I’d display a diversity of interests. I was trying to open the door for as many people as possible to be interested in me based on the first impression of my profile. My mindset was that the hard work of finding the right fit would come later, so no need to close any doors now.
Lastly, I wanted to show off that I was funny. But you can’t just say “I’m funny” and have people believe you. Some profiles would say things like “must speak sarcasm” but that was pretty lame. I’d seen other people put an actual joke or funny line that showed off their sense of humour, so that was an option. I’d swiped on one girl’s profile that only said “your future ex-wife” and they turned out to be hilarious, but I didn’t think this was the right move for me.
I’d performed stand-up comedy once in my Creative Communications program, so instead of saying “I’m funny” I could just say that I’d done stand-up and let them infer any meaning they wanted from that. Finally, to further solidify my sense of humour, I would do the whole write-up with a healthy dose of self-deprecation.
So there it was: nerdy, hockey, funny. That seemed like three good pillars to talk about. Here’s what I came up with:
I’m way nerdier than my pics let on, I’m the best player on my hockey team because we play in the absolute lowest skill division, and I did stand up comedy once and it went well enough to brag about but not too well to have done it a second time.
I thought it was pretty good! And it accomplished a major thing that I found was crucial for dating apps but especially for Bumble since women had to send the first message — it gave women something to follow up about. They wouldn’t have to sit there thinking, “hmm… what do I say?” I got loads of opening lines that said some variation of “so, what makes you nerdy?” which was a perfect invitation to start talking about our mutual interests. Or I got a lot of “tell me one of your jokes from your stand-up!” I was making it easy for them to make that first move because I was giving multiple options to inspire them.
Next, I was allowed three pre-written prompts to answer from a pool of a few dozen choices. I wanted to give a few more options of things to talk about, while also maintaining what my values were to a prospective partner. I went with the prompt “If I had three wishes, I’d wish for…” and answered:
1) My twin to do a little bit worse than me. 2) meet Jon Favreau from Pod Save America. 3) to never go bald
This mainly accomplished asking about my twin being another easy opening line from women. Being a twin is apparently interesting (for some reason. As a twin, I know that in fact being a twin is not interesting in the slightest, but people are weird and who am I to judge?), so why not? I got a few follow-ups about Pod Save America too, an easy indicator that we had similar political values, without needing to scream “NO CONSERVATIVES” (though we’d both want to do that, I’m sure). As for going bald, hey, gotta show those insecurities right off the bat. I would get some openers along the lines of “you have really nice hair” which would satiate my ego nicely, but truthfully it didn’t come up that often.
The next prompt I chose was “Perfect first date…” and I answered:
Finding out we hate all the same things
This was great for getting openers centered around “what do you hate the most right now?” I would actually have some trouble answering this one from time to time since most things I was hating at the time were pretty heavy topics for an opening Bumble message, so I’d go with more banal stuff at first just to get a conversation going.
My last prompt was “Favourite quality in a person…” and I answered:
Self awareness
A bit of a throw-away answer at that point, but I felt I had more than enough good ammunition from the rest of my profile. And this meant people didn’t have to read too much each time they saw something on my profile.
Hinge media res
A couple of years later when I had to spin off these lessons into my first Hinge profile, I took much of the same tactics. I used mostly the same photos, but without an About Me section, I had to find a different way to get my information across. I was allowed three written prompts on Hinge, so I just spread out my nerdiness, stand-up comedy, and hockey answers into those three prompts. Easy!
Hinge profiles for women were generally much more filled out than I had seen on Bumble or Tinder (which were often just pictures and that was it). They also had some different options that I hadn’t put into a profile before — a video prompt and an audio prompt.
When I first made a Hinge profile, it was winter and I thought I had a great idea for the video prompt “Let me teach you how to…”. I took a friend out to the frozen river trail at The Forks, where hundreds of people skated every weekend, and got her to film me skating on the ice. I figured a) by virtue of someone else holding the camera, this showed I had actual friends b) this was in public with many skaters behind me, showing I liked to go out and do fun things and be a social person and c) how many movies have romantic skating dates in them? Rocky, Serendipity, Home Alone… okay that last one isn’t romantic exactly, but it’s still very memorable.
Plus I had recently bought a great winter jacket that I was feeling very stylish in, so I just knew I would be brimming with confidence on my face for prospective swipers to see. I moved far back, yelled action, and skated full speed at my friend holding the camera, halting right in front of her to create a dramatic burst of snow from my hard stop. Unfortunately, I just ended up snow showering all over her shins as we both burst out laughing. We tried a couple of others, but that one was perfect.
For my audio, I looked through the options for things to talk about and finally found a great one: “My self-care routine…”
From dates I’d been on up to that point, I learned that the bar was incredibly low for how men handled their own grooming. I’d hear women talk about the many disgusting bathrooms they’d stepped into. How so many men only used shampoo, conditioner, and body wash all-in-one bottles. One made a point of saying how great it was that I had a facial moisturizer with sun protection in it (I didn’t mention that I hadn’t used it once yet). Another was shocked I knew the term exfoliate.
So I recorded a nice little story about how in my new job I could suddenly see what looked like wrinkles on my forehead when I was on video calls, so I instantly invested in a retinol cream that I’d slather on every night to fight the aging battle. Women got to hear my voice as I jokingly told my story (and tried maybe a little too hard to sound suave, but whatever) while demonstrating that I could take care of some basic self-grooming.
And the responses poured in! Whereas stand-up and nerdiness were often brought up on Bumble, my self-care and skating abilities were the top responses on my Hinge profile.
Tinder didn’t have prompts the same way Bumble and Hinge had. They gave you just one spot to write what you wanted but left more options for pictures. I really did feel like pictures were a far more important aspect of Tinder, but I still had to write something. I ended up writing a list of things I had and did not have, like:
Have: a job, hair, height, ability to skate
Have not: religion, any kids yet, DUIs, ability to fight
I found that since you could quickly tap through to see all of someone’s pictures, without having to see anything that they wrote, it just wasn’t as important. Pictures ruled the day here.
Ultimately, I created three different profiles for Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder that all had their own feel based on what the app was asking for. They were actually pretty fun for me to make, and I’d seen so many examples of other profiles that left so much to be desired. Sometimes this was from people posting their profiles online, but often it was by going on dates and swapping phones to investigate the other side of these apps. These always led to fun discussions of what people’s first impressions were and what kind of instant turn-ons and turn-offs were around any corner.
(Also, sometimes if there was no chemistry on a first date, I’d offer to do this as disarming yet fun get-to-know-you activity… but it was 90% for “market research” for my analytical brain. Yeahhh I can be a calculating asshole sometimes…)
Taking all the apps into account though, my profile strategy worked great for me. It gave an actual glimpse into who I was while teasing enough details that they’d hopefully be intrigued and want to follow up with some questions. There was plenty to ask about, with a variety of my interests on display. And I looked like I wanted to be there! There was no “kill me, I hate dating apps” or any type of cynicism in my profile. Even just scrolling through my photos and reading nothing, I looked like a happy person who had friends, went outside, met up with other people, knew some basic self-care, and had a vague sense of fashion.
The real key to my success though, and the lesson I kept learning over and over again throughout all of my dating was this: the bar was so low. So many other guys weren’t putting in the effort. It was as if they were TRYING to not get matched on dating apps. When the bar is so low, these features went a long way toward my success, and I thanked all the gods I knew of that they made it so much easier for me.
