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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
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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 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.
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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