How to write a great dating profile

Summary
Avoid clichés, don’t talk about beaches, be specific and try to have fun.Someone recently asked me to edit her dating profile. I told her I was the last person on earth she should be asking because I have never been an online dater and would probably be terrible at it. There is, for instance, not a single picture of me in existence where I look warm, approachable, smiling or fun. I am, however, a writing professor, so I tried to help.
When people are nervous or self-conscious, as the dating profile writer likely is, they write toward what is expected, toward clichés and platitudes and predictable tropes. “Looking for someone sweet and funny." “Looking for someone sensitive and kind." But if you are trying to distinguish yourself from a sea of people, you don’t want to use the exact words everyone else is using.
In dating profiles, as in all writing, generic is bad; specific is good. Think of the qualities you are looking for and try to telegraph them in a setting. A man looking for someone independent could write: “Not afraid to eat a hamburger alone at a bar." At all costs, avoid beaches, travel, sunsets. If you really must include a beach, render it with details: “Reading a Graham Greene novel under a palm tree."
In conveying the unpredictable, the distinct, the unique, contradictions work well. For things you like, “High heels, 19th-century novels, mojitos" is better than “Netflix, staying in, cozy beds." Something like “Diva, brainiac, sex kitten" is more intriguing than “Bookish, nerdy, erudite."
People often feel the need to present a more perfect, polished, gleaming version of themselves. But the strongest profiles are the ones that effectively express a true, distinctive aspect of self, of personality, of character. Ultimately you want to meet someone who likes the actual you, not an idealized, airbrushed, people-pleasing version. The awfulness of writing a dating profile is the awkwardness of selling yourself, but what if you just try to be descriptive?
Women sometimes aim to cater to a generalized male fantasy of the cool girl—a beer-drinking, pool-playing, sports-watching, back-of-a-motorcycle type who just wants to “see where things go." If that is you, fine. But if not, this kind of fakeness won’t necessarily attract the person you want to attract.
“Most of the conventional advice is very vapid," says Jennie Young, a rhetoric professor and the creator of the Burned Haystack Dating Method, an online-dating strategy that involves ruthlessly filtering out unsuitable matches. She has studied patterns of language in profiles that lead to relationships, applying to dating sites the kind of close reading that scholars typically reserve for poems or the Talmud.
Young argues that it is good to put people off. She advises people to “be direct, honest" and “to intentionally set the tone," because it’s better to attract fewer people you are more likely to actually click with. The key, she says, is knowing yourself—who you are and what you want. She adds that quirky, idiosyncratic profiles enjoy a distinct advantage when compared with the proliferation of profiles created by AI.
Many of the best profiles nod to the impossibility of representing a whole person in a couple of sentences. Anything that acknowledges the absurdity of the situation signals an awareness, a humor, a flicker of intelligence. It sends a message to the hopeful, uncomfortable person on the other end, “I am playing the game because I would like to meet someone, but I realize how artificial and forced and absurd it is."
One way people do this is with humor. One Burned Haystack user wrote: “Greatest strengths: I don’t use bunny ears filters. I am not a yoga teacher or a life coach. I don’t have a crazy ex, and I am not a crazy ex." Or “You should not go out with me: If you demand I be no drama. If you are 50 years old and still not sure if you want kids. If you are currently in bed."
Another way to convey an inviting sense of irony is by citing a random fact. Joanna Goddard, the Brooklyn-based creator of the Cup of Jo lifestyle website, wrote a profile that included: “interesting fact: a group of sharks is called a shiver."
One thing I know from my many years as a single mother is that abstract ideals quickly melt away when you are dating. You can tell yourself that you are looking for certain qualities, but if you meet someone exciting, those checklists become irrelevant. So the trick in online dating is to be open, to allow for surprises and sudden turns. In this spirit, it can be good to consider people who might seem slightly outside your “type."
“Sexual desire doesn’t always neatly conform to our own sense of it," the British philosopher Amia Srinivasan has observed. “Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love." Keeping this in mind may be the most important element of profile writing and app surfing, given just how easy it is to set rigid parameters for things like age, height or education.
Writing a dating profile can feel like someone is removing your toenails one by one, but try having fun with it as this typically makes for better writing. The energy, the lightness, the hint of openness despite the totally unnatural and, let’s face it, semi-demoralizing situation, will come across to potential flames. It can be useful to view it as a game. Can you give just a glimmer of the real you?