Profiles

I read a lot of online dating profiles, and have found a certain commonality. Unfortunately, it’s something that many people don’t think is a deterrent for potential matches, so they don’t notice that they’re doing it. Or they think it will help weed out matches if they include it, but if you do this, it works against you.

What is this thing that we do that is hindering rather than helping our chances?

We state upfront, at the beginning of the profile exactly what we don't want.

In other words, phrases like “no drama, please” is like waving a red flag to your potential dates. As one dater said in her cheeky profile: “your baggage should fit in the glove compartment of your car.” Unfortunately, she is asking for trouble. These kinds of phrases should be tossed. So should descriptives like “no cheaters, crazies, players, gold-diggers, liars,” and those who post “fake profile pictures.”

Why is this such a bad thing? After all, most of us want to avoid these types, right?

The truth is, when you state what you don’t want, you are not only turning off the very people you want to attract (who will assume you are just as crazy, or a liar, etc.), you will attract the kind of dater you don’t want to meet. Are you ready for the drama? Didn't think so.

Your profile isn’t a sounding board for all of your past experiences. While others might identify with you, it won’t necessarily attract them to you. In fact, it works against you. They might be envisioning you stalking them (if you’ve dated cheaters), or that you have lied about your age or posted old photos (if you mentioned no liars), or that you are a drama queen if you are emphatic about not wanting drama in your profile.

Instead, your profile needs to focus on the life you want to create – your future. If you really want to attract someone to you, you have to paint an inviting picture. In other words, focus not only on the positive, but let them know who you are – funny, sensitive, intelligent, really into anime, a Dodgers fan, whatever you would like to include. Invite a conversation by talking about your interests, and asking if potential dates have any stories to share.

Inviting a conversation goes a long way. Describing your interests, your passions, your curiosity about life is sexy and attractive. It makes people want to find out more. They can better envision what dating you might be like.

Emphasizing what you don’t want in a relationship doesn’t communicate anything about you and what you do want, so it’s much harder for potential matches to visualize being in a relationship with you – except for its potential negative consequences. Avoid this, and you will improve your online dating experience significantly.

In Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg’s new book Modern Romance, they discuss the disconnect of online dating in Japanese culture. Despite Japan’s adoption of and love for technology, single people still stigmatize online dating.

The reasons are part cultural and part historical. Japanese singles haven’t had a good experience with online dating, historically speaking. In the 1990’s when online dating first hit the singles scene, online dating companies had male members pay per message and also used their female employees as bait, posting their profiles on the dating sites to attract more male users. More recently, fake dating sites have been exposed, with companies using male employees to pose as girls on the sites and charging their male members to talk to them – (obviously, those members never get to the date).

It’s easy to see why Japanese singles are skeptical. But now dating apps have made things a little easier to verify. First, like most dating apps all over the world, users are verified through their Facebook profile, so it’s not easy to create fake accounts. And Japan is really embracing social media, especially after both LinkedIn and Facebook helped families find each other after the 2011 earthquake.

But another interesting trend is happening with Japanese online daters. The culture is rather conservative when it comes to dating – and guys don’t want to be thought of as players. Since dating apps have become synonymous with hook-ups, Japanese - and men especially - are weary to sign up for fearing like they will come across as insincere. So people aren’t really embracing online dating.

In fact, they aren’t dating much at all. Most Japanese singles are much more focused on work, which means working long hours and delaying starting a family. This is also taking a toll on their social lives. A 2014 survey by the Japan Family Planning Association found that 49% of all respondents had not had sex in the past month, and 18% of men said they had no interest in sex at all. On top of this, they face a serious population decline.  According to Business Insider, a 2012 report by Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research shows the number of Japanese people will fall from 127 million to around 87 million by 2060.

Still not everyone is averse to online dating. The country has seen some interesting trends.

Selfies tend to be popular with online dating in most countries, but are looked upon as narcissistic in Japan. Even a photo showing an online dater by herself is frowned upon because Japanese tend to view this as self-centered. Most daters either post photos with a group of friends (so you can’t really identify the person you are meeting), or they post photos of their cats or random objects. One of the weirdest trends among online daters is posting photos of their rice cookers in their profiles, according to Modern Love.

There are definite cultural and practical barriers to get beyond when it comes to online dating in Japan. But as time goes on and it becomes more trust-worthy and mainstream, hopefully singles will embrace it.

Younger daters are really into dating apps – they helped bring Tinder into the mainstream, and now there are a slew of new dating apps hitting the market, allowing you to do everything from set your Instagram feed to music (Raya) and obtain the dating profile of that girl at the coffee shop you just couldn’t bring yourself to talk to (Happn). While younger daters are active on these apps, as it turns out, the fastest-growing group of online daters is 60 and older.

But do younger and older online daters date differently? University of Texas researchers Eden Davis and Karen Fingerman suspected that their were contrasts between their motivations for online dating, but wanted to determine this through the content of their profiles, so they conducted a study published this month about the differences in profile language and motivation each age group has when it comes to dating.

While we know people using dating websites and apps are typically motivated to find a partner and to date, we know little about the differences of what motivates them to use dating sites, what exactly they are looking for, or how they present themselves to different partners. Gathering 4000 online dating profiles from men and women across the United States, the researchers sampled profiles evenly by gender and from four age groups (18 to 29; 30 to 49; 50 to 64; and 65 or over). The final sample ranged in age from 18 to 95.

First, the researchers studied the most common words used in profiles by all age groups, which included: like, love, music, good, enjoy and fun. But they also discovered different age groups used different words in common when crafting their online dating profiles. For younger daters, these most frequently included the words: go, get, work, school, laugh, movies, much, find, think, try and anything.

Older daters seemed to be more focused on building connection. Their profiles most frequently included words like: man, woman, share, relationship, humor, travel, years, honest, important, well, sense, and family.

Eden said in her report: “Notably, older adults used more positive emotion words such as “sweet,” “kind,” and “nice,” more first person plural pronouns such as “we,” “us,” and “our,” and more words in the ‘friends’ category. These findings suggest that when they present themselves to potential partners, older adults focus on positivity and connectedness to others. Not surprisingly, older adults were also more likely to use health-related words such as “ache,” “doctor,” and “exercise.”

Younger adults tended to enhance their profiles, using mostly first-person singular pronouns like “I” and “me.” They also tended to focus on work and achievement.

The researchers concluded that adults of all ages were looking for love and a partner to enjoy life with, but that younger adults focus more on themselves and their own attributes, while older daters focused on positivity and connection to others.

Thanks to Tinder and online dating, there is a bit of a gap between communicating with someone online and actually meeting them in person – IRL if you will. For instance, let’s say you match with someone you find attractive, and then send her a message. She responds right away, and you have a good text/ message rapport. So you decide to ask her out for a drink. Suddenly, she is busy with work, is out of town, and has no time right now to meet.

You feel your hopes deflating with each excuse. It is disappointed to get emotionally invested in someone online, only to have them flake out when it actually comes to the date. Rest assured, you’re not alone.

I’ve been on both sides of this scenario. It is frustrating to adjust your own schedule to make room for dating, and then your matches don’t return the same courtesy to you. Maybe she is busy with work, or maybe she is traveling a lot right now. I remember postponing first dates due to scheduling conflicts, but I quickly found out my matches dropped away like flies, looking for someone who would be available to date. And if you’re on the receiving end of your match’s excuses? Ask yourself: do you really want a relationship with someone who doesn’t have enough motivation to meet you in the first place?

If you have a little more patience, suggest talking on the phone in the meantime. And set some plans in the near future when your calendars are free and she is in town.

And if she resists that, too, claiming she just doesn’t have the time? Take heart: this is probably not a real person you are dealing with – or at least, a person who is really interested in dating or finding a relationship. This could be a scam at the very worst – and at the very best, she is someone who is unsure of what she really wants. Unless you want to end up in a textual relationship at best, or scammed out of money or emotions at worst, it's best not to even bother continuing the communication.

Remember, this is your dating life. You have the right to expect others to actually date if they are on a dating app. Don’t resign yourself to accepting an endless stream of text messages that go nowhere. Instead of lingering in your messaging app, hoping someday to take things offline, cut to the chase sooner. Ask him or her out for a drink or coffee. If they put off meeting you, move on to the next.

It’s hard to know if there will be a spark between you until you are looking at each other in person, IRL. So meet your dates.

You've heard that you need to put your best foot forward online. So, thinking you were doing exactly what you're supposed to do, you agonized over your username, your self-description, your photos. Every detail of your profile was carefully reviewed and redone until you felt confident you'd achieved perfection.

What if all of that was unnecessary? According to research from the University of Iowa, appearing too perfect online can actually work against you.

The study found that daters are distrusting of profiles that are too flashy or flawless. Instead, the most successful profiles are those that offer an authentic look at who a person really is.

"We found people want to contact a person who appears to be accurate in what they are saying about themselves online," said one of the study's authors, University of Iowa communications professor Andy High, in a statement. "It's tough when it comes to dating profiles because we want someone who seems like an amazing person, but we also hopefully will have a relationship with this individual, so we want them to exist."

To test how daters respond to different types of dating profiles, the researchers created 8 fake OkCupid profiles (4 men and 4 women) with combinations of two possible orientations. The first was “Selective Self-Preservation.” Profiles with this orientation highlighted the good aspects of the person's life while downplaying the negatives. The other kind of profile, “Warranting,” contained information that could easily be traced to a real person.

150 men and 167 women were asked to review the profiles and decide which ones they would contact. The majority chose profiles of the second type – those that did not present the person as perfect, and contained info that made the person feel more real.

In other words, people were turned off by profiles that appeared too good to be true. When stories of online love gone wrong come out on a daily basis, it's hard to blame them for being wary.

“Users of online dating sites are aware that people misrepresent themselves, and inaccurate profiles are one of the biggest drawbacks to using online dating sites,” the study says.

It's a difficult position to be in. Paint an unattractive picture of yourself and your profile won't get very far. Paint a picture that's too attractive and you're in the same boat. So what's an online dater to do?

“You want to balance all that is wonderful about yourself with some things that aren’t negative, but more humble or realistic about yourself,” says High. “It’s important to put your best foot forward, but maybe not in your best pair of shoes.”

Curious to find out if that’s really Leo DiCaprio or Hilary Duff using Tinder? Now, you can rest assured that either it’s a fake, or yes – your favorite celebrity is really on Tinder. (And maybe there’s a chance for a mutual swipe right...)

The latest update to Tinder brings with it a much-anticipated feature: verified profiles. But the verification in its current state doesn’t extend to all users. Specifically, Tinder verifies the authenticity of well-known people who are using the service, whom Tinder describes as “notable public figures, celebrities and athletes.” Following in the steps of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Tinder will now add the recognizable blue and white checkmark badge to all verified celebrity profiles.

Tinder has been known to have problems with spam bots and fake profiles in its database, which has raised concerns among many in terms of its cybersecurity and the potential for its users to be catfished. One example is the number of fake profiles set up by prostitutes, who offer prices for their services should you swipe right on their profile. Other red flags have been raised when some companies advertising their services began using fake profiles to entice customers, without Tinder's approval.

But the real concern among Tinder management was not the safety and security of every day users – it was the fact that celebrities weren’t getting many matches because nobody believed their profiles were real.

So, the new feature came about not because of complaints or requests from the general population of Tinder users, but at the request of celebrity clients using the service. As Rosette Pambakian, vice president of global communications and branding at Tinder, told The Huffington Post: “Many celebrities were telling us that no one believes it is really them on Tinder, so we launched verified profiles to authentic users who are notable public figures.”

So how does the verified profiles feature work? Celebrities can email verified@tinder.com to be considered for the badge, and Tinder will review requests on a case-by-case basis. If you're not a celebrity don’t try to submit one yourself, because for now, only notable public figures will be considered. But if you’re Heidi Klum or a single politician? That’s a different story.

So what does this mean for the average Tinder user? Not much has changed. While you won’t be able to tell if the average profile you are looking at is a real person or a scam, you will be able to tell if Brittany Spears or Lindsay Lohan shows up as your match. They will be marked verified.

To find out more about this service please read our review of Tinder.