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?
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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.
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.
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.
Ok, well one of my red flags is "this person judges people maximally uncharitably based on one liners in their profile". So if something filters out those people, that's a great thing for me! The point isn't to get dates, it's to get dates whom you actually like.
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