The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Can we talk online dating strategy? I've been away from it for a while, but the rest of my life has been running well for a while, I have recent pictures of me doing cool things, and it's probably time to re-add it to the ways I try to meet people.
First up: goals. I'm male, late 30s, never married, no kids, would like to change the last two of those. Had a few short-term relationships over the years, most from various partner dance scenes. You can probably infer a lot of my hobbies from the fact that I post here: nerdy, wordy, techy. Which platforms are doing the best for relationship-minded people these days? Last time around I signed up for Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder; and had the most luck with Hinge, then Tinder, then Bumble.
I've seen a lot of advice about tailoring a profile to specific sections of the dating market, so that the women you want to be into you are more likely to want to start a chat. For those of you who have had success online, how did you decide who to tailor for? There are a few different sides to myself that I could see myself enjoyably sharing with the right woman: I could enjoy camping/climbing/bouldering/etc with an adventurous outdoorsy woman, sharing a table with a nerdy boardgames type, etc. I feel that if I try to list everything, I make a profile that stands for nothing, and doesn't really excite anyone. But I feel also that trying to present one narrow side is inauthentic and makes it more likely that the profile's Elo will tank (more women will dislike it).
Second: I've become pretty right-leaning over the past few years. Not as far as some of our especially based posters here, but probably near the edge of my city's Overton Window. Is it correct to assume that answering "conservative" or even "moderate" for the "politics" question is a kiss of death? There was an interesting thread the other week about political compatibility between partners, and the extent to which people are tolerant of heterodoxy with an established partner. That made me think it might be better to omit it in the initial profile but also not hide it from the women I do meet when it comes up. I don't want to give up my principles for a shot at a relationship (that way leads to lies and ruin), but I also don't want to screen off people who I could actually get along with, had we spent some time learning about each other before diving into politics.
Third: Has all the language model/image generation stuff further warped the dating app landscape yet? I can imagine the bot problem being a lot worse now. Alternatively, have you used it to tune your profile/messages? If so, how did that work out?
I'm very interested in other people's success/failure stories (on-app or off), as well as suggestions for IRL places to meet people.
Female perspective. Profile pics are the most important thing for most of those platforms.
You need:
Proof of teeth,
Proof of hair (one way or the other),
Proof of friends,
Proof of hobby/activity (all selfies isn't getting this done). One of these photos should show that you have a body as well.
It would great if you were wearing something nicer than a tshirt in at least one of the photos. If you don't have the latter two types of photos go to some meetups. Lack of friends/activities is very unattractive.
As for the height issue, it is obviously important, but don't know what to tell you. I'm personally fine dating down to my own height 5'6 but everyone under 5'10 on all of these sites seems to be lying so I usually keep that in mind.
Final tip that nothing in your profile should be negative and about things you don't want.
Thanks for concise and actionable advice. I'm astonished that "proof of teeth" has to be on your checklist.
It's more that there are men who don't smile broadly in any of their pictures. Probably serial killers.
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