Tips

There’s an art to attracting a woman’s attention – especially when it’s through your online dating profile. The biggest mistake I see guys make is assuming that women will automatically respond to their emails or overtures – when the truth is, most women are bombarded with messages.

You have to cut through the clutter to make a good impression. It’s up to you to make your profile stand out so that she will want to respond. Maybe it doesn’t seem fair that guys have to work a bit harder in that respect, but that’s the reality. And isn’t it worth it to meet a great woman?

Following are some tips to give your profile a competitive edge:

Be yourself – not your resume. As cliché as this sounds, there really is meaning behind it. No woman wants to hear all of your work accomplishments or accolades, she wants to know if she can connect with you. Instead of crafting a resume, try expressing what you’re passionate about, what you want to learn, or your sense of humor.

Watch the grammar! Proofing is the most important thing you can do for your profile, at least according to the latest Match.com study. The vast majority of women want to know that you can put a sentence together (not text-speak). Considering how many people leave incomplete profiles with poor grammar, this will give you an advantage.

Stay away from selfies. Have you been working out? Do you want to show off your six-pack? Please don’t. Even if you look great, your matches will be turned off because you’re showing yourself to every single woman on the site. Instead of taking that shirtless selfie, try taking a picture playing a guitar instead. Studies have shown that if you include shots of yourself doing something active – especially playing a guitar or musical instrument – you’ll get more responses.

Be sincere, not generic. It might seem easier to write things you think women will want to hear, but it will work against you. “I like long walks on the beach” will cause her to scroll right past you. Instead of going for cliché try injecting your personality into the mix. What do you really like? Where would you take her on your ideal date? What’s your favorite memory from childhood? These details into who you are will capture her attention.

Complete the profile. So many men leave profiles blank or hide photos, which will cause a woman to think you’re hiding something (maybe a girlfriend). Don’t write an essay or refuse to post photos, but DO use complete sentences and try not to leave anything blank. If it looks like you spent about five minutes filling out your profile, she’ll notice. A little more effort goes a long way.

 

If you've experimented at all with online dating, odds are you've come across that impossibly perfect profile pic that made you think "Oh great, now I’ll never find a date because this #^@*$ is going to steal them all!”

Not so, says science. Online dating may feel like window shopping for hot people, but it's actually the more unusual looking people who score the most dates. In fact, having some people find you unattractive could work to your advantage.

Hannah Fry, of the YouTube channel Head Squeeze, claims that this seemingly counterintuitive claim makes sense if you take game theory into consideration. Looking at the data, it's definitely not true that good-looking people get the most messages on an online dating website. What's more important than how attractive you are is how much you divide opinion.

Picture two celebrities. The first should be someone, like Halle Berry, who is universally acknowledged to be one of the most attractive people on the planet. The second should be someone, like Sarah Jessica Parker, who tends to be more controversial. If you asked people to rate the attractiveness of both celebrities on a scale of 1 to 5, the majority of people would choose the same number for the first celebrity. For the second celebrity, however, you would likely see a large split between the top end of the scale and the bottom end of the scale. That spread is what's most important on an online dating site.

Online daters are better off dividing opinion like the second celebrity than they are being thought of as objectively attractive like the first celebrity. And that's where game theory comes into play.

Online daters sending messages are probably thinking about their own chances before initiating communication with someone. A user who appears to be objectively attractive will probably receive hundreds of messages from interested suitors, meaning that each individual faces stiff competition. On the other hand, the user whose looks are more controversial means less competition for the suitors who are interested. It's extra incentive for them to get in touch.

Most people, when they set up an online dating profile, go to great lengths to hide the things they think make them unattractive. We leave out certain interests to hide our nerdy sides, or only post face photos to hide the imperfections of our bodies. It seems like a good strategy on the surface, but it's exactly the opposite of what we should be doing in order to have the most success online.

The more you play up what makes you different, even if you think some people might find you unattractive because of it, the more likely you are to attract people who are genuinely into you.

There's a lot to learn from reading about online dating (trust me, I know!), but there are also plenty of lessons that can't be learned off a page or computer screen.

It's like the first time you ever got sick from drinking too much. You knew that's what would happen, but somehow it didn't quite seem real until your head was in the toilet. And the hangover…oh, the hangover…

The good news is, online dating is a lot less scary than you think it is. But the bad news is that there are some things you'll have to learn the hard way:

1. Trust your gut. If you think something is off, it probably is. Your adventures in online dating will include meeting some strange people and getting even stranger messages, and though most everyone is kind and respectful, the bad apples are out there. Put your safety first and don't do anything if you don't feel 100% comfortable.
2. Rules can be restrictive. Knowing what you want is a good thing. Having deal breakers is a good thing. Setting ground rules is a good thing. But nothing is right all the time, and if you're not willing to occasionally bend your rules or change your expectations, you run the risk of missing out on someone awesome.
3. It's a rude world out there. Offline, it's pretty rare that someone leaves you hanging. Online, it happens all the time. You'll be exchanging e-mails back and forth with someone you’re into and then, all of a sudden, they’ll completely disappear. It feels a little disappointing at first, but the sting wears off.
4. Get straight to the point. As the formerly-shy type, I understand what a challenge it can be to be direct. Fortunately, online dating is the perfect opportunity to practice being assertive. Being direct is the only way to guarantee that uncomfortable situations come to an end. Date isn't going well? End it early and don't feel bad about it. Don't waste your time or anyone else's.
5. That goes for going on dates, too. It's tempting to exchange endless messages with someone new in the name of safety, but don't do it. Yes, you should be safe, but don't fall into the trap of becoming penpals. Meeting in person is the most efficient way of gathering information about someone. There's only so much you can learn about a prospective date by reading, and virtual chemistry doesn't guarantee real-life chemistry.

Bonus lesson learned the hard way: Don’t take your dates to your favorite spots. If the date goes south, you don’t want to run into them later at one of your regular haunts (especially if one of you is on another date!).

Wondering why you’re not getting many responses to your carefully crafted online dating profile? The first thing to check – because this is the first thing other daters will notice – are your pictures.

As we all know, attraction starts with visual appeal. This doesn’t mean you have to be some kind of Greek god or supermodel to get a few dates, but it does mean that you have to put your best foot forward and show the people who you are. And according to OkCupid who has done a lot of research on this – your best selling point may be the physical feature you find most flawed.

People have different tastes, so embrace that.

Did you look to the most popular kids in high school when you needed dating advice? After all, they must be doing something right!

More often, I tried to listen to the good friends I had that knew me so well, but OkCupid seems to go along with the theory that the most popular kids have the most to teach the rest of us, at least when it comes to dating. So, I wanted to take a look at what they were saying.

OkCupid picked four of the most popular daters on the site (male and female, gay and straight) to provide tips for singles on how to online date.

The most popular straight female is a 23 year-old woman named Lauren who gets a lot of attention from her striking pictures and tattoos that cover her arms and legs. According to a recent interview in New York Magazine, Lauren receives around three dozen emails a day; in the last seven months, she’s received five-star ratings, the highest possible rating, from nearly 8,000 men.

Lauren admits she has an advantage because she is a make-up artist and knows how to create a good photo. Plus, she knows how to work the camera to show off features because guys are most interested in visuals. “I believe in a head-to-toe shot to show what you look like,” she says. “But you don’t need to have your ass hanging out!”

She also notes her love of astronomy, explaining that she likes to show her intelligence as well as her looks, even though guys still will message women based only on pictures (as we saw with a recent OkCupid experiment with the worst profile ever created).

She got a surge of emails she got when she first joined the site by choosing “casual sex” as a relationship possibility, along with long and short term options. This opened a floodgate of lude emails from guys. “I’m not a prostitute,” she tells the magazine. “But they don’t get that.” So she removed this description from her profile.

Some of the most questionable advice came from 29 year-old James Hawver, who said that he could double for Ryan Gosling, which I’m sure if it was true he would be one of the most popular guys on the site. He likes to accept every woman as a potential match, which I admire. When he uses Tinder, he accepts all matches even before looking at them. Same with OkCupid. He wants to know that a woman is interested before he starts messaging, so he only responds to the ones who accept him back, in order to cut down on the rejection. Because this can be time-consuming, he sends out the same generic yet flirtatious email to each of them, and gets quite a few responses.

He also likes to “round out the truth,” especially when it comes to physical factors like height. He is an inch shorter than his 5’10” profile would proclaim.

What does he do with all these matches? He goes on a lot of dates, and he doesn’t seem ready to settle down anytime soon. “A lot of us want the best: the best job, the best apartment, the best significant other,” he says.

So I guess it makes sense to keep on dating. For more on this online dating service you can take a look at our Okcupid.com review

You already know online dating is a great way to meet your match, but apparently it's also a great way to do something a little more unexpected: learn economics.

In his new book, Paul Oyer explores why online dating is an ideal way to study economic concepts and how they can be used to write a résumé or make an investment. Oyer is the Fred H. Merrill professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating. Dense economic concepts, he believes, can be understood more easily when looked at through the accessible lens of online dating.

Online dating is a great place to learn economics because it's a market that anyone can understand, yet it functions in the same way as significantly more complex markets. Most people associate economics with money, explains Oyer, but money is an unimportant detail for most economists. Online dating allows Oyer to clarify economic ideas without mentioning money.

For example, the way an investor would research start-ups to put money into is similar to the way a woman would search through profiles on a dating website. In both situations, the person knows they have limited information and that the other side has a compelling reason to skew that information in their favor. Both people know that they must be careful when making their decision and that a better opportunity could come along if they postpone, but they must weigh that against the fact that they could be left for a long time with nowhere to invest or no one to date if they choose to wait.

"Shopping for a date" is surprisingly similar to shopping for clothes. A "thick market" is one with lots of buyers and sellers, which means more competition and more variety. If you have very specific taste in clothes, a bigger mall with more options is more likely to have what you're looking for then a small store with a limited selection. And a dating site with more users is more likely to find you a quality match than a dating site with fewer users.

Choosing a date also has something in common with the hiring process. Studies have shown that companies shy away from hiring someone who has been out of work for a long time, even if the person has appropriate skills. The company assumes that long-term unemployment occurs for a good reason and sees the person as "damaged goods." Likewise, if a person reaches a certain age and has never been in a serious relationship, potential partners make negative assumptions about him or her.

In the same way that you have to be careful about what you say on your resume because potential employers will make assumptions, you have to be careful about what you say on your online dating profile.