Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Does anyone have any good links to blogs or posts about how to use dating apps optimally? I figure someone has this stuff figured out
Cred
Back when I was on the dating app roulette, I was told by female friends that I had a great profile. Other women have asked me 'how to find men like me' and I have been called a 'what a shame he's straight' by a gay man. I haven't been on the market for a couple of years, but the advice should still be valid.
Most important - Be recognizable
Women go through a million same looking profiles. The worst thing to be is unrecognizable and vanilla. Have at least 1 thing about you that stands out. Discussing dating profiles is a favorite past time for women. It is good be a certain type of guy. 'The chef', 'the fashionista', 'the salsa dancer'. If you're just 'a guy', you will fall through the cracks.
My dating profile photo checklist:
Cheat codes: Wield them as you see fit.
Prompts:
Dos and Donts:
Useful reddit links:
Contrarian take: if your goal is to actually find a soul mate and not just a number of short flings, don't do this. Be yourself, aggressively. DO mention your less conventional hobbies like anime on your profile, unapologetically. Be creative and unique and weird, in a way that turns off almost everyone EXCEPT for that rare person who actually likes who you are.
I did this for several years, and 90%+ of the women I messaged ignored me completely. I barely got any responses, and the conversations I did have usually didn't lead anywhere since I was a weird goofball. And then a girl who had D&D listed in her bio responded positively to my D&D inspired pickup line and we dated for several years before eventually getting married. And now we stay at home playing board games and playing with cats instead of having to do stupid things like go hiking or eating at restaurants the way I would if I had managed to convince a normal girl to date me.
Your advice is excellent for maximizing engagement. But you will spend a lot of time dating a lot of average people who like average things if you take it too far. Obviously some of your advice is just general good advice for emphasizing your positive traits that you already have and doesn't run into this issue. But I think being authentic in a negative way (by normie standards) is actually useful to help filter out the normies and find someone else who shares your quirks.
I think this debate might be a question of satisficers vs optimisers/maximisers.
This is further complicated by the dual dating strategy of satisficing for short term while simultaneously maximising for long term (and maintaining the facade of not committing to either while remaining open to both).
This is still further complicated by dating questionnaires that focus on trivia and are trivially gameable. "Do you think it's okay to cheat on dating questionnaires? Yes/No". Hmmmmm... nnno. Wow, so match percentage.
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D&D isn't weird anymore. I see tons of women's profiles mention D&D, and my photo of me at my weekly bar game with mixed genders gets me absolutely nowhere.
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I partially disagree.
The goal of right-swipes is to avoid the serial killers. It is low-pass filter meant to remove the bad apples. Then, you find if they're your soul mate on the date. It's not that anime are a cringe hobby. It's that many men who mention anime as a hobby are underdeveloped manchilds. There are many exceptions, but women correctly assume that finding the needle in the haystack is a futile effort.
Depends on how hot you are. Anyone who wants choice, assumes that they are hot enough to have choice. A normie should first get a bit of experience. Date around so you know how to get sufficient interest.
Remember, men do most of the swiping. This means that OP can always send a targeted 'unapologetic' message to a woman if they find this 'anime loving soul mate'. But for other women, they don't immediately put up red flags. The profile is a low-pass filter. The date is the high-pass filter.
I am aggressively myself after the first date. On a first date, both parties are too nervous. I still recommend being authentic on a first date. But have a peeling-the-onion approach to revealing aspects of yourself. Don't go in with the sledge-hammer. If you're meant to be soulmates with anime as a common hobby, then anime will come up whether you want to or not. But, if you're soul mates and she doesn't like anime, then aggressively shoe horning it in can set off alarms.
Now for the caveat. I recommend sprinkling 'dog whistles' in your profile. My linked spotify was full of odd genres that signaled my weirdness. If you're into anime, you can link some 'fear and loathing' or 'Nujabes'. If you have abs, it's okay to cosplay as Luffy from One Piece of Goku from Dragonball. You can wear Hokusai's great wave tshirts or a photo of you hiking Mt. Fuji. A keen Japano-phile will clock you right there. But, it won't turn-off the anime-ignorant. Just avoid posting photos at a manga-con or akibahara.
Fair
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I still would avoid obvious icky hobbies on a dating profile. Anime has a very strong association with porn, child porn, and childishness. Video games tend to send immature and irresponsible signals. If you have a weird hobby that’s fairly active, creative, or social, fine. But the goal here is to get a woman to want to take a chance on you. It’s like searching for a job in a sense — anything that would make a woman hesitant to hit the “buy” button is probably not a good idea. One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.
This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.
You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.
But if you don’t get any hits or very few because your “about me” is full of anime and gaming, im assuming that this is a major part of your life, much like I’d assume that someone who mentions golf on their profile has golf as a major part of their life, and probably will spend most weekends on the course. Someone who’s into gaming enough to mention it on a dating profile is likely going to game at least 25 hours a week, and maybe more. If I’m looking for a person I might want to marry, I don’t see that in a guy who spends most of his free time with a controller in his hands. And I do like gaming, I just don’t want my life to consist of trying to squeeze in all the other stuff around the hobbies of gaming and anime.
Again, these are correct signals that I am sending intentionally. This IS a major part of my life. I DO spend at least 25 hours a week on anime and games. If you are looking to do "all the other stuff" that isn't gaming and anime and squeeze it around then you're not my 1 in 1000 and I don't want to marry you. That just sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and strife. While some amount of compromise is important in a relationship, and you should sometimes do things the other person wants to do for their sake, the less it's necessary because you both want the same things, the better. If one person expects to go out and do things all the time and the other wants to stay home all the time then at any point in time only one of them is getting their way. So if anyone sees this and realizes that I'm not the right person for them because I'm literally not the right person for them then good, we can both save some time and try to find someone more compatible. In practice, this did turn into me getting very few hits for precisely that reason. Most women saw my profile, made this assumption about me (correctly), they thought this was a negative trait, and then they didn't want to talk to me. Mission accomplished.
Because one did want to talk to me. Instead of dating and/or marrying someone like that, I found someone with whom I get to keep doing videogames and anime and my wife will do them with me. Well, she doesn't care for anime that much, but we play lots of games together. Sometimes we're just sitting next to each other playing completely separate games and she'll giggle as the monsters die and it's adorable. And sometimes she'll want to go somewhere and do something and I'll suck it up and go because it's not very often, because she's mostly like me and genuinely wants to be at home most of the time.
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It ultimately comes down to how wide a net you're willing to case. Yes, if you're looking for someone who shares interests that 99% of women find unattractive (but not so unattractive as to be dealbreakers), and you aren't willing to date someone who doesn't share these interests, then just put it out there as a filter. If, however, like most people, you don't expect the person you're dating to like 100% of everything you like, then it's not worth scaring anyone off. Remember, these women have options, and the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to hit the dump button before making an attempt to get to know you. I've learned from my own habits that it doesn't take much to set this off. Not that it's necessarily anything negative, but that the profile provides so little information that I wouldn't even know where to start. You have to give me something to work with if you want me to start a conversation with you. If 99% of women aren't into anime or video games, and it isn't something that otherwise makes you look attractive, then even if it's ultimately neutral it's not doing much. And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
I understand what you're saying, and I'm happy for you, but GP was giving generalized advice. Like I said, most people aren't that selective. I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love". It's not what most people are looking for. And while I understand not wanting to get too involved before finding out it's a dealbreaker, it's not like you're going to keep it a secret. Like I said in my post, when you're online dating, you are your profile, and you're going to be your profile until she meets you in person. The profile is to get your foot in the door; after you actually meet, you're a real person, and discussing hobbies and interests is fair game for a first date, and you can tell her whatever you want on that front. And if you think that one date is too much of an investment to be worth the risk, then online dating just isn't for you, period.
Nobody is giving that advice. They are saying "if you like something, it's fine to put it in your profile", because they believe (correctly imo) that those who are put off by that are people you don't want to date anyway. There's no need to obsessively list everything which might be a red flag for someone somewhere, the point is to just be yourself and not worry about those who don't like that.
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I thought my girlfriend and I were the most introverted couple out there, but we like going to restaurants and visiting scenic sites. Though I admit, there's a lot of "watch youtube on the couch."
It's interesting that a lot of dating advice is
"be attractive""be extraverted", and introverts have a hard time dating. I wonder at times how introverted women are meeting men. Perhaps the answer is "they aren't"; I have a theory that introverted women make up a majority of the "women going their own way" and not dating. I don't know that I've ever dated, or seriously considered dating, or asked out, a woman I would consider extraverted, and I wonder at times whether this contributed to my limited success back when I was on the market.Which is weird because you would think that online dating would be the perfect environment for introverts. I never was able to work up the courage to ask out a girl in real life. I could never quite tell when it would be creepy and unwelcome and when it would be fine, so I always erred on the side of caution. But online dating everyone is there explicitly for the purpose of meeting people and can ghost you the instant they feel uncomfortable, so I didn't have to worry about that and could just be honest about being attracted to people. And can do it from the comfort of my home and not have to go outside and meet people in real life and do public social stuff with lots of people when I'm trying to have a one on one conversation.
Maybe the issue is that most of the shy introverted women get scared off by the tons of attention and unsolicited dick pics from creepy guys even online, and then the shy introverted men are left in a sea of women who have thick enough skins to stay anyway.
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I think that's true, and there's also another filter aspect to consider. If you don't care whether a partner shares your interest in X, but you require them to be ok with your interest in X, then you should also put it as a filter. Doing so avoids wasting your time on a relationship that wasn't going to work out anyway as soon as the girl says "I think anime is icky, stop watching it" and you refuse to give it up.
It's anime, a perfectly mainstream form of entertainment. Some women may find it off-putting, yes, but it's not like having kids, or smoking, or religion, or that kind of thing that you should tell someone up front. Most women probably wouldn't care if they found out, it's just not something that adds to your attractiveness. Worst case scenario, you can bring it up on the first date, or when you're texting back and forth. The point is just that it's not something that you want to waste valuable profile real estate on, to increase your chances of getting a foot in the door.
I just don't think that there's a loss here. Profile space is not scarce, so if you're worried that someone will find it a dealbteaker then put it in. It's better to go on zero dates than on one date which goes nowhere.
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Exactly, until they have had a chance to actually interact meaningfully with you, women are going to be maximally uncharitable with anything you say on your profile. Because they can afford to, as "men willing to message them on apps" are not a scarce ressource at all for them. So if you mention anything about anime in your profile, especially if it's one with limited real estate (I don't know how Hinge works specifically), then they will assume that this means anime is a massive part of your identity, so their mental image of you will shift to that of a neckbeard weeb with waifu bodypillows..
It's the same as with the politics we were discussing in this thread too. Until there's a bit of time/emotional investment from her part, you want to avoid giving her any reason to reject you; because as far as she knows, somewhere in her inbox is a message from her perfect 10, 6'3, 8" cock, liberal surgeon/prince who shares all the same interests as her, so why would she waste any time trying to understand what kind of human being someone with any yellow flags at all is like?
Once she's met you, or had some meaninful communication with you that humanises you, that changes, of course.
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This take is so heavily out of date I'm wondering if it was frozen in about 2011 and just recently thawed out and revived.
Anime fans aren't relegated to 4chan these days.
One of the most popular series on Netflix in 2022 was an anime series tied into the Cyberpunk:2077 universe.
Netflix has been producing a TON of original anime series themselves. They literally revived a series from 2001 to help fill out their roster.
Which should tell you they're finding viewership for this stuff, and not just among loli enthusiasts.
Now, you might be correct as to how the older generations view anime, but there's probably a similar number of female weebs as male weebs about in the younger gens. Now, if you're looking for someone who is NOT a weeb, then yeah, maybe exclude it.
Even if that take is outdated, liking anime and video games isn't something that women are going to find attractive. It's neutral at best, and you don't want to waste your limited real estate conveying information that isn't going to move the needle in your favor. A lot of guys make profiles that seem tailored toward impressing other guys, but girls do the same thing as well. I guess the female equivalent would be mentioning that they like reality TV. What guy is going to find a girl more attractive after learning that she's really into Real Housewives? It isn't something most guys are going to look forward to watching together, it doesn't make her seem more interesting, and it may give the impression that she's kind of stupid.
As stated by @MathWizard up there, if you want someone with similar interests to you, you gotta put it out there somehow.
And as per usual, if you're hot, you could straight up say you're into lolicon and hentai and you'd still get likes.
So are you optimizing for hookups, or something resembling a soulmate?
In the grand scheme, its probably not changing your odds much in aggregate, but somewhat increasing the chances of finding someone who likes what you like.
You don't have to have the same interests as your soulmate. You have to get along and cooperate on tasks and share values.
The happiest couples are ones who know when they bore each other to tears, not ones who never have to worry about it. Because the latter are imaginary.
You'd like to find one that doesn't find your interests repugnant, though.
And again, why optimize to compete for the same limited pool of women that every other guy is now optimizing for.
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It's not about hookups vs. soulmate. It's about whether or not you expect a soulmate to have certain interests. If the answer is yes, you only want to be with someone who likes anime as much as you do and is attracted to guys who like anime, then I agree that you would have to put it out there. But that's not the way it is with most things or people. Just look at how much attention to sports men pay vs. women. Or woodworking. Or hunting. Or any number of other hobbies or interests. You can't expect your romantic partner to have 100% of the same interests you do, and most married couple I know aren't like that, right down to my parents. So yes, it's possible that you can be really into anime and have a girl who knows nothing about it and rolls her eyes at the idea of it and still have a successful relationship.
Indeed, once you clear the dozen other hurdles and expectations she'll have too.
I'm just pointing out that if you optimize for the 'wrong' thing, you could end up in a local maxima that gets you more likes in general, but actually filters out the women you'd really be happy to have.
And hey, if you get one and have to 'settle' a bit, its not so bad.
But if EVERYONE is optimizing for the same set of things, and the pool of women is fixed, you're really just creating a zero sum game that means you can get nothing at all despite (because of?) giving up on the things you really like.
I repeat, the pool of women is mostly fixed, so why do you want to optimize for the same thing every other guy is optimizing for?
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