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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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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This take is so heavily out of date I'm wondering if it was frozen in about 2011 and just recently thawed out and revived.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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