How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Online Dating
I once swiped left on Scott on Tinder.
I told you how I met him—in college and then years later at the Google shuttle stop. What I neglected to mention is that before he started tutoring me, I saw him on Tinder. I flipped through his photos and then rejected him.
It was 2014, and I was heading home from work on the shuttle bus, stuck in San Francisco’s dreary traffic, when Tinder served up a photo of a guy who looked vaguely familiar. We had enough friends in common that I knew we must have gone to the same college. Backward baseball hat. Tank top. Unsmiling eyes squinting harshly into the sun. He looked like a bro. Not my type. I swiped left.
Why did I reject this person—someone who has made me very happy—when I saw him online? How did I come to such an inaccurate conclusion about him?
I thought I knew what I wanted and what would make me happy in a long-term relationship. And I believed I could accurately evaluate someone based on a few photos.
I was wrong on both counts.
I’m not the only one prone to these kinds of errors. Many of my clients have everything going for them—great personalities, friends, hobbies, and so on—but remain perpetually single. Why? They’re dating wrong. It’s not their fault, and it’s not yours. We can often blame it on the apps.
According to research by Stanford sociology professor Michael J. Rosenfeld, “met online” is the most common way romantic partners connect today, followed by “met in a bar or restaurant” and then “met through friends.” (Less common responses included: “at the rodeo,” “while complaining to random strangers about how much I hate these f**king dating apps,” and “Red Lobster.”)
In the last twenty years, digital dating has exploded: Rosenfeld found that while only 2 percent of couples met online in 1995, 39 percent now meet that way. And as more couples connect digitally, fewer meet through social connections—like friends, family, and work—or through communities like school and church.
Much like we’ve seen with all social media giants, while apps create many thriving relationships, they can also perpetuate harmful cognitive biases among their users. Since so many people are meeting this way—and even people who don’t use the apps often go out with people who do—app makers have a subtle but astonishing amount of power over our love lives. They are designing the environment in which we make decisions about dating. And, by extension, they deeply influence the decisions we make.
Traditional economics assumes people have consistent, static preferences. But behavioral scientists know that’s a lie. The truth is, our environment matters. We’re impacted by the setting in which we make our decision, whether that’s a physical location or a digital landscape. What we choose is highly affected by how the options are displayed. We may think preferences are permanent, but they’re actually rather pliable.
Here’s an example of how that plays out with our food choices. A few years ago, Google diagnosed its employees with “an M&M problem.” To nudge them into making healthier food decisions, an internal team of behavioral scientists changed the environment in which the snacks were presented. They stopped offering M&M’s in giant clear bins that enticed snackers with the multicolored chocolate treats. They moved the candies to clearly labeled but opaque containers, where they would be less tempting. Healthier snacks, like dried figs and pistachios, sat nearby in clear glass jars.
These were bright tech workers who had known the healthy snacks were available the whole time. But merely changing the environment in which food choices were presented resulted in employees eating 3.1 million fewer M&M calories over seven weeks in the New York office alone. According to the Washington Post, which covered the experiment, “that’s a decrease of nine vending machine-size packages of M&M’s for each of the office’s 2,000 employees.” In the Google office, nothing changed about the employees’ preferences. But those opaque containers made all the difference. That environment had a huge impact on employees’ choices.
When it comes to modern dating, our decision-making environment is the dating app. We’re affected by the way the app presents certain matches and the order in which those matches appear on our screens. That’s why my clients tell me about swiping no on someone on one app and then swiping yes on that same person on a different app a few weeks later. These small contextual differences have a big impact on our decisions.
To be clear, I am not anti-app. Apps have introduced millions of happy couples who may not have met otherwise. Dating apps have been especially meaningful for singles in so-called thin markets, including the LGBTQ+ community; people in sparsely populated areas; and daters over the age of fifty. And not all dating apps are the same. I’m a fan of those that focus on helping people get off the app and on real dates.
(In fact, after writing this book I took a job as the Director of Relationship Science at Hinge. Not only is Hinge singularly focused on getting their users off the apps and on real dates—as evidenced by their slogan “Designed to be deleted”—they also hired me to do exactly what I hope to accomplish with this book: help millions of people around the world learn how to date more effectively.)
But unfortunately, the way that certain dating apps present information can cause us to focus on the wrong things.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ll teach you how to make the apps work for you so that you can take advantage of digital dating while avoiding possible pitfalls.
I was in the middle of writing an email when Jonathan knocked at my door, fifteen minutes late for his first session. I had figured he wasn’t going to show.
“Sorry, sorry!” he said, extending his giant hand to me. “I got stuck at work.”
Jonathan was tall, fit, and charming. His dimples appeared when he smiled or pronounced the letter “c,” as in “CEO,” his current title. He was from the Midwest and had lived in San Francisco for about five years. He’d been single for most of them, save for a few connections that had seemed promising but then fizzled. After years of struggling on dating apps, he’d come to me for help.
During our first few sessions, I learned what a high standard Jonathan held himself to and how successful he’d been in other areas of his life: student body president in college, winner of major international awards, Rhodes Scholar, and more. He was ambitious but also thoughtful and funny. (You know, the kind of person your parents would longingly compare you to.)
He said, “I’ve been using the apps, and I’ve been on a ton of dates. I know what I want, but I just haven’t found him yet. I’m looking for an in-shape business executive who’s at least six-four. Can you help?”
“Yes, I can help,” I responded. “But not in the way you think.”
Jonathan didn’t need an introduction to the right tall businessman. He needed to completely reset his mindset for dating. That began with understanding all the ways in which the apps were affecting him.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, decades of relationship science have revealed what matters for long-term relationship success: things like if the person is emotionally stable, kind, and loyal, and how that person makes us feel.
Yet current dating apps don’t let you search for any of those qualities. How could they? It’s hard enough to accurately measure personality traits, let alone what those traits would elicit in you. Instead, dating apps are limited by the information they can reliably capture and catalog: height, age, college, job, and how good someone is at selecting flattering pictures that make them look cool yet approachable, sexy but playful.
This is a problem. As management consultants love to say, “You are what you measure.” In a column on this topic for the Harvard Business Review, behavioral economist Dan Ariely wrote: “Human beings adjust behavior based on the metrics they’re held against. Anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric. What you measure is what you’ll get. Period.” If you create a frequent-flyer reward system where you measure miles flown and tell customers that this number matters, Ariely explained, customers respond. They start booking absurd flights from faraway airports to maximize their miles. In other words, we’re suggestible—show us a metric and we’ll assume it’s important. While people have always prized certain superficial traits, the apps make us think they’re even more important simply by measuring, presenting, and emphasizing them.
University of Chicago professor Chris Hsee writes about a related concept called evaluability: The easier it is to compare certain traits, the more important those traits seem.
Imagine this scenario (and for the sake of this thought experiment, imagine you’re interested in men). I walk up to you on the street and say: “You can go on a date with one of these two single men. One guy is five-nine and one is five-ten, but the shorter one makes more money. Who do you want to go out with?”
Most likely, you’d walk away slowly, confused why a stranger was asking you such a weird question. If you decided to stick around, I’d follow up with another question: “How much more money per year would a shorter guy have to make for you to find him as attractive as a taller man?”
At that point, you might laugh awkwardly and tell me it was impossible to come up with such a number. But thanks to research from Dan Ariely, we know it’s not. He discovered that there is, in fact, a quantifiable correlation between height, income, and finding success on the dating apps. And it’s not small. Using data from a popular dating website, Ariely found that a man has to earn $40,000 more each year to be as desirable as a man one inch taller.
Yes: $40,000.
Evaluability helps us understand why. In real life, you may meet guys who are five-nine and five-ten and barely notice their height difference. (And you certainly won’t know their income—unless they tell you, unprompted, which is gross.) But as we just learned, the more a quality can be compared, the more important that trait seems. Apps make it easy to compare height. While women have long favored tall men, the digital world exacerbates this preference. Because of the explicit height comparison across online dating profiles, shorter men are at a much greater disadvantage than they would be in the real world. No wonder Jonathan was so focused on the height of his potential husband!
You may be asking yourselves, how much does a woman’s income affect her desirability? Turns out it doesn’t. High earners don’t inspire single men on that dating website the way they inspire single women. Instead, the quality that men cared about most when evaluating attractiveness was body mass index (BMI). They preferred a woman whose BMI was 18.5—slightly underweight—and didn’t care about her salary or her level of education. Again, it’s not that men actually value thinness in potential life partners above all else—they’re just stuck working with a limited set of comparable qualities. (Also, ughhhhh.)
Which brings me back to why I swiped left on Scott on Tinder. I was selecting potential partners based on the superficial traits featured on the dating apps, and I’d created an image of an ideal partner that he just didn’t fit. If you’d asked me when I was swiping what I’d wanted in a partner, do you think I would’ve said “five-eight redheaded vegan engineer”? No, probably not. I easily could have set a height minimum of five-nine and never even seen Scott. Yet—after dating more than my fair share of people—I found that he is the man who makes me the happiest. (And it turns out he’s nothing like the bro his pictures made him out to be.)
This is all to say that the apps may lead us astray by emphasizing measurable and comparable qualities. They can trick us into valuing these traits while ignoring the qualities that relationship science tells us matter most.
My clients often come to me with long checklists of all the qualities they want in a partner. But the strange thing is that most of us have not dated that many people. We have relatively little experience, especially where it counts for figuring out compatibility in long-term relationships. Yet we think we are experts in what will make us happy.
This is a major point! Underline this next sentence, please: Most of us have no idea what kind of partner will fulfill us long term.
Yes, we think we know what we want. Yes, we have that long checklist. But those are likely not the qualities possessed by the person we fall in love with. Our eventual partner may be completely different from what we expected. Remember, I wasn’t looking for a vegan engineer.
Being wrong about who would make you happy long term is not a new problem created by technology. But in real life, you’re exposed to all kinds of potential partners: tall and short, fat and thin, intellectual, funny, introverted, religious, atheist, whatever. If you’re looking for a partner in the physical world—at a book club, a pottery class, your friend’s birthday party—you meet people who aren’t your so-called type. You could develop a flirtation, and then a relationship, with one of them. You might be pleasantly surprised by how wrong you were about needing to date someone who, say, is taller than you or grew up religious.
But dating apps never give you the chance to be proved wrong, because you can weed out people who aren’t your “type.” I once conducted in-person interviews with folks who met their husband or wife offline. I asked, “If you had seen your current spouse online, would you have swiped right or left?” Many people told me they wouldn’t have seen their future partner at all because their app settings would’ve shut them out. “My age limit was up to one year older than me, and she’s five years older than me,” one guy told me. “My app setting was for Jewish men only, and he identifies as Buddhist,” another said.
Many digital services require you to go through an onboarding process when you sign up. Netflix, for example, asks what kinds of movies you like. For dating apps, it’s what kind of people: What’s the youngest person you’d date? What’s the oldest? What’s the tallest or shortest person you’d date? Do you care if this person smokes? Does drugs? Drinks?
From a practical perspective, it makes sense that apps use the onboarding process to limit the number of potential matches. Dating apps can’t show us an infinite number of people. They have to narrow things down somehow. But most people aren’t making these decisions carefully. You see, during the onboarding phase, users are in a rush to see potential matches as quickly as possible. They answer the questions with about as much forethought as they’d use when filling out a make-your-own sandwich form at the grocery store. But unlike smoked turkey, Dijon mustard, and extra-sharp cheddar, the ingredients we hastily select for our dating profiles may or may not make us happy.
These decisions have a huge impact on our dating experience. The constraints we set filter out potentially great matches. This would be like rushing through your sandwich order because you’re hungry for lunch, marking off a box that says “Turkey only,” and then finding that every time you went to get a sandwich in the future, you could look at only turkey sandwiches.
Of course, we could change our preferences on the dating apps after we sign up, but most people don’t. This is because of something called the status quo bias—our tendency to leave things as they are, to not rock the boat. That’s why businesses with subscription-service models tend to be lucrative. If you sign up for a gym membership and it’s automatically renewed each month, you’re much less likely to make the call to cancel than if you had to decide every month whether you want to keep the service.
The same thing happens when people sign up for a dating app. Once people set app preferences during onboarding, they’re very unlikely to change them. The apps show us people who meet our initial criteria—the type of people we think we want. If you believe that you’d hate dating a woman who’s taller than you are, and the apps offer you only short women to choose from, you never get the chance to be proved wrong.
Many of us conduct extensive research before making a purchase. If you wanted to buy a camera, for example, you might compare and contrast along every potential axis—megapixel count, image quality, weight, battery life, cost, and so on. Dating apps create the illusion that we can do the same comparison shopping with potential partners.
In fact, while researchers once called the process of transitioning from strangers or friends to romantic partners as “relationshipping,” they now speak of a new phenomenon—“relationshopping”—searching for our mate like we’d search for a new pair of shoes. But treating potential partners like potential purchases gets us into trouble.
A team of behavioral economists, including Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, explained in a research paper that many consumer items are “searchable goods”: things like cameras, laundry detergent, and big-screen TVs that can be measured based on their objective attributes. These differ from “experience goods,” which they define as being “judged by the feelings they evoke, rather than the functions they perform. Examples include movies, perfume, puppies, and restaurant meals—goods defined by attributes that are subjective, aesthetic, holistic, emotive, and tied to the production of sensation. Most importantly, people must be present to evaluate them; they cannot be judged secondhand.” We’ve all seen a movie that got bad reviews but made us laugh. Or tasted wine that earned amazing reviews but didn’t taste good to us. We’ve been pleasantly surprised or surprisingly disappointed by experiencing these goods ourselves. The process of evaluation was more personal than just knowing that we wanted a wide-angle lens.
People, the authors of this paper tell us, are experience goods. We are not like cameras. We are much more like wine. (If you’re like me, you’re also full-bodied, a little dry, and getting better with age.) We cannot be understood by comparing and contrasting our parts. Yet dating apps have turned living, breathing, three-dimensional people into two-dimensional, searchable goods. They’ve given us the false belief that we can break people down into their parts and compare them to find the best one.
Apps primarily give us a list of résumé traits and nothing more. Only by spending time with someone can you appreciate that person for the “experiential good” they are.
The first night I downloaded Tinder, I spent six hours swiping. Yes, that’s longer than it would take to binge-watch the entire first season of Fleabag. I went through hundreds, possibly thousands, of profiles. As if it weren’t enough that dating apps can confuse us about what’s important, they can also make it harder to choose whom to go out with. Our brains aren’t set up to select a partner from so many options.
Remember what psychologist Barry Schwartz discovered about the paradox of choice: We assume that more choice will make us happier, but that’s often not the case. In fact, too many options make us less happy, in part because of choice overload. It can feel so overwhelming to compare our options that we may give up and make no decision at all.
Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar and Stanford professor Mark Lepper demonstrated this in a now-famous study. They entered a gourmet grocery store and set up a table of free gourmet jam samples. When they offered twenty-four types of jam, people were more likely to approach the table than when they offered six jams. However, customers who sampled from among the twenty-four jams were far less likely to buy any jams than those who encountered only six options. The researchers hypothesized that when you have six options, it’s possible to make a confident decision about which jam you’ll like the most. But twenty-four options are so overwhelming that people often make no decision at all.
In a grocery store, that might mean leaving with no jam. In the world of dating apps, that means not finding a relationship (also, sadly, no jam). And selecting a potential partner is way harder than selecting a jam out of twenty-four options: choosing from not just twenty-four but thousands of people and perhaps committing to one for the rest of your life. In dating, we may feel so overwhelmed by the options that we decide not to go on any dates at all. Even if we do, it can feel impossible to know whom to date seriously.
It’s not just that too many choices make it hard to decide. Schwartz tells us that even when we’re able to overcome choice overload and make a selection, having so many options to choose from makes us less satisfied with what we choose. (This effect can be amplified when you’re a Maximizer, as discussed in Chapter 4.)
We start to think: What if I’d chosen something else? Would that have been better? Would I be happier? That train of thought leads down a dark path toward regret. And the effect multiplies. The more options you have to choose from, the more chances you have to feel regret about your selection. This can even lead to feelings of depression.
In this case, more is less—or at least less fulfilling.
I’ve worked with all kinds of daters. I know that not everyone experiences the paradox of choice in dating. It depends on factors like race, age, gender, orientation, and location, which all affect the size of your dating pool. (Plenty of my clients wish they had too many options to choose from.) But if you’re someone who’s getting a lot of matches, or you’re caught up in the game of seeing how many people you can swipe on, you might already understand the impact of the paradox of choice. Remember, the point of a dating app is to go out on an actual date, not to spend all of your evenings swiping.
In Clueless, one of my all-time favorite movies, Tai, the new girl, asks Cher, the most popular girl in school, what she thinks about their classmate Amber. Cher says, “She’s a full-on Monet. It’s like a painting, see. From far away, it’s okay, but up close it’s a big ol’ mess.”
I call this error in judgment the Monet Effect. When we have only a rough perception of someone, our brain, hoping for a great outcome, fills in all the gaps optimistically. People seem way more desirable than they actually are. It’s only later, when they transform into real people standing in front of us, that we see the flaws.
We can see this play out in the corporate world. When companies search for a new CEO, they can choose between promoting an internal candidate or hiring an external one. Research into these decisions found that companies who decide to hire externally have sky-high expectations of the candidates. When you evaluate external candidates, you know only the broad details about them. They tell you about their wins. Internal candidates, you know more intimately; you are familiar with their successes and their failures. The Monet Effect helps explain why, when compared to internal candidates, external CEOs are often paid more but perform worse.
The same thing happens with dating. Looking at a dating app profile is the equivalent of seeing someone from very far away. All you get are a few carefully selected photos and some basic information. You go out on the date, and maybe the pitch of their voice bothers you or they have bad table manners or you are not aligned on the time and place for dad jokes (them: always; you: on Full House reruns only). Instead of those flaws seeming normal—because they are, and everyone has some—they leave you greatly disappointed. There goes the perfect person you built up in your mind. In the bathroom, you can’t help but open Tinder. Time for the ol’ swipe-and-wipe. You give up on the date you’re on and start fantasizing about the next person on your screen, who seems perfect because of the Monet Effect. But as soon as you meet that match in person, you realize they have flaws, too, and the cycle continues. This creates a grass-is-always-greener reaction: You always think the next thing will be better than what you have. You’re dooming yourself to an endless cycle of unrealized connections.
All of these issues are working against you, making it harder to meaningfully choose whom to date. You’re focusing on factors that are less important than you think and comparing people in ways that don’t reflect their true potential. But there are ways to use the apps to date smarter.
The people you see on the apps are a reflection of the restrictions you set up when you joined. Think back to that time. There you were. You’d just downloaded the app. You were full of hope. Birds were chirping. When asked to choose your settings, such as height and age preferences, you likely rushed through this step, because you knew hundreds of potential love interests were waiting for you on the other side.
And, for all the reasons above, you might have made a mistake. While you may think you know what you want in a partner, you’re probably wrong. Therefore, I want you to be more open-minded about whom you allow the apps to show you. Take out your phone and update your settings. Yes, on all the apps. Yes, right now. For the people you’re filtering out, whom you once thought were too young or too old, could you be more flexible? And would you really not date a great person outside your stated height range?
Also think about your non-numerical requirements, like “must have graduate degree” or “must be Catholic.” Those yes/no switches probably represent preferences for deeper values—intellectual curiosity or a connection to tradition—that the apps have difficulty capturing.
Do this now. Seriously, I’ll wait. (I’ve been craving a smoked turkey, Dijon mustard, and extra-sharp cheddar sandwich for the last fifteen minutes anyway.)
I completed this exercise with Jonathan. He broadened his height requirements and immediately saw way more men than before. Intelligence and sense of humor were still must-haves, but Jonathan recognized that he’d have to look for those qualities by reading people’s profiles, messaging with them, and getting to know them on actual dates. The apps couldn’t filter those for him.
You’ve updated your selection settings. Now it’s time to update your selection process.
Challenge your assumptions. One time I observed my client making her way through an app. We came across a guy who looked cute and had a funny bio. She swiped left. I asked her why, and she said, “He was a consultant, and consultants are boring.” What?! All consultants? Every single one? She was assuming she knew everything she needed to know based on one fact about this person’s life. What you do isn’t who you are. And people with the same job can be completely different.
Here’s another example: I worked with a client who loved traveling and wanted someone who had also traveled extensively. I helped her understand that adventure and curiosity were the underlying traits that mattered to her, not how many countries he’d been to.
Fast-forward a few months. She met a lovely guy who had never left the country before because he’d lacked the financial means to travel. However, he shared those values we’d identified. For him, that had manifested in starting his own business. She helped him get his first passport. Now they travel together constantly. If she had filtered only for people with a passport full of stamps—as she’d originally intended—she never would’ve given him a chance.
Just because you know where people have been or where they are now doesn’t mean you know where they’re going.
Look for reasons to say yes. It’s tempting to approach dating apps as an exercise in discovering what’s wrong with people or finding a reason to say no. Instead, try to be less judgmental. I’ve seen people swipe no when they read something like “teacher” (“Oh, he won’t make enough money for me”) or “yoga instructor” (“I don’t want to date someone who worships crystals and wants to activate my chakras”). You don’t know these people. You’re seeing a tiny sliver of who they are—a few photos and some basic information. If someone is a maybe, swipe right now and see what happens. As you evaluate potential matches, look for what’s attractive about someone rather than what turns you off.
Deciphering traits by looking at the apps is more of an art than a science. Don’t assume you know what people mean by their answers. Does checking “yes” to “occasionally does drugs” mean “I’ll take an edible on a camping trip” or “I go on the occasional black-tar heroin binge”? Does checking “Catholic” mean “I was raised Catholic but am not actively practicing” or “I’m in the front pew every Sunday”? Don’t presume you know exactly what people meant when they answered the same vague questions you struggled with. Why not meet them and explore these topics in person?
Go on dates with people whom you don’t necessarily think are a fit. That’s the only way you can figure out what you actually like rather than assuming you already know.
A woman I know posted a rant on Facebook about how “sad and misguided” online daters are these days. As evidence, she posted a picture of a recent profile she’d seen. In response to the prompt “My most irrational fear,” he’d written, “Marrying someone with a name that isn’t conducive to a wedding hashtag.” She found the answer flippant and—I’m quoting her Facebook post here—thought it represented “the downfall of millennial dating.” (If you’re not familiar with wedding hashtags, it’s when the couples combine their names into a punny phrase that people use when posting pictures from their wedding. For example, when my friend Dani married her husband, Eric Helitzer, her hashtag was #highwaytohelitzer, a reference to the AC/DC song.)
I, and many of the people who commented on the post, disagreed. At first, I resisted the urge to engage, but then I couldn’t not say something. I responded “My $.02: I think it’s a mistake to judge someone too harshly for their response to a single question on a dating app. I’ve watched many people create their profiles and they complete the process as quickly as possible so they can start seeing matches right away. Perhaps this answer is a little flippant for you, but I think it’s funny and tongue-in-cheek. This response suggests to me that he’s been to enough weddings to roll his eyes at wedding hashtags, so perhaps he’s a loyal guy with a big friend group. And if a lot of his pals are married, maybe he’s feeling ready to settle down, too. His answer also suggests he loves puns and hopes to marry someone whose name is conducive to a punny hashtag.”
She wrote back that she loved puns and was willing to rethink her original perspective on the guy. She said she wished she could go back and say yes to him.
Look, I’m not saying you should swipe yes on almost everyone. Rather, be open to the fact that someone may be far more interesting in person than a profile suggests.
At this point, you might be wondering, Wait, isn’t this the opposite of the advice you just gave me? No. I want you to broaden your filters to see different kinds of people and go out with some of them. But—and this is a big “but”—I don’t want you going on tons of dates at the same time. That will only make the Monet Effect worse.
It’s easy to keep swiping, swiping, swiping, and setting up dates. If you’re feeling addicted to the apps, it’s not your fault. Really. Many believe Tinder was intentionally designed that way. While conducting research for her documentary, Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age, journalist Nancy Jo Sales discovered that Tinder was inspired partly by psychology experiments—in particular, those in which famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner conditioned pigeons into thinking that their random pecks would lead to food. “That’s the whole swiping mechanism,” Sales said on Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast. “You swipe, you might get a match, you might not. And then you’re just, like, excited to play the game.” No wonder I spent six hours on Tinder that first night. (And once went on 8.5 first dates in a week. I’m still trying to figure out what that half a date was.)
Choose not to play the apps like a game. You’ll make better decisions if you pace yourself and go out with a limited number of people at once. Try to really get to know them. If expanding your settings means a bigger menu, then dating fewer people at a time means savoring each dish.
One of my clients doesn’t go out with more than three people at a time. She finds that’s her perfect number, at which she can give each person a chance to let the relationship grow but also can compare how she’s feeling with each one. If you go overboard and chat with too many people at once, or constantly fill in your calendar with first dates, you are likely to end up like the person who sampled from the table with twenty-four jams. You’ll try more jams but won’t know which one to buy. The result? A lonely walk home, a bellyache from all that sugar, and dry toast.
Thus far, we’ve talked about how you should assess other people’s profiles. Meanwhile, they’re also evaluating yours. If you’re struggling to get the results you want, here are some evidence-based tips for getting more matches and going on better dates.
Duh, photos matter. They take up the most real estate on most apps. People will often swipe on someone based on a photo alone and scroll down to see more information only if they like the first photo.
Hinge researchers studied which types of photos elicited the most positive responses from its users, which it shared in a 2017 blog post. For this analysis, they randomly selected profile photos of a thousand members, tagged them based on their qualities (such as candid versus posed, smiling with or without teeth), and evaluated their performance. Here are practical tips based on their findings:
From helping my clients set up their profiles, I’ve found that most people are pretty bad at selecting their most attractive photos. I’ve developed a system to help. I ask my clients to send me ten to twenty potential photos. With their approval, I put them together in an online album and send them to contacts of mine around the country who are unlikely to ever meet my client. Those people rank the photos, indicating which pictures they like, which they’d delete, and which they’d use as the important first photo. There’s often a consensus around which photos work best; it’s almost never the photos my client chose for themselves. Once I see a pattern, I rearrange my client’s photos to reflect the feedback.
EXERCISE: Select Better Photos
Collect ten to twenty photos of yourself (ideally a combination of photos of your face, your full body, and you doing an activity you love, like cooking or hiking) and send them to several friends. Ask which pictures they’d include, which they’d delete, and which they’d use as the first photo. Or run your own experiment on the apps: Swap out different photos to see which ones lead to the most matches.
Present yourself accurately. I once coached a woman named Abby who claimed she was looking for an outdoorsy guy: She was attracted to “lumbersexuals”—hipster guys with beards and plaid shirts. Her photos included one of her hiking, and her profile mentioned an interest in nature. Yet the truth was, she hated spending time in nature. “Abby,” I said to her, “your luggage tag literally says, ‘I love not camping.’ This isn’t you. This is who you want to be for the type of guy you think you should be with.” Through our work together, we crafted a profile that was much truer to her personality. We included artsy photographs of her from a recent trip to Berlin. We wrote about her passion for live jazz and overpriced whiskey. While it seems obvious, a good profile should represent you, not an aspirational version of yourself. Being up front about who you are will help save you heartache down the road, like Abby having to tell her hypothetical lumbersexual boyfriend that she doesn’t want to join him for a five-day avalanche training course.
To spark conversations be specific. The point of a profile is to spark conversation, not come across as overly clever. Make sure your profile creates opportunities for people to follow up and connect. Let’s take the Hinge prompt: “Qualities I’m looking for in a plus-one wedding date.” If you write, “Someone who’s not married,” that’s funny, but it doesn’t really open the door to conversation. Instead, if you put “Knowing all the words to ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls,” that could spark a chat around nineties music or who will sing the Scary Spice part when you do karaoke. If you write, “Someone who will challenge me to a dance-off,” that’s a great opener for a chat about signature go-to moves. The best way to spark conversation is to be specific. Include quirky things that make you stand out. If you say, “I like music,” that doesn’t really tell me anything about you. Cool, who doesn’t? Same with writing that you like travel, food, and laughter. That’s like saying you like Tom Hanks. Yeah, dude, he’s an American hero. Don’t tell me you like to cook; describe to me your signature dish and what makes your Vietnamese soup pho-nomenal. The more specific you are, the more opportunities you give potential matches to connect by commenting on that quirk.
Focus on what you like, not what you don’t. I’ve been surprised by the number of people who fill their—limited!—profile space with what they’re not looking for. I understand the urge, but this sends a negative message. Your vibe attracts your tribe. Use the space to attract people who share your actual hobbies, not your hobby of complaining. Focus on what brings you joy, not what you hate or are trying to avoid. (By the way, have you noticed that people who say, “No drama, please,” often tend to engage in the most drama?)
Enough with “Hey” and “How’s it going?” Don’t ask people how their weekend was. That’s boring! Good opening lines are (again) specific.
The goal of an opening line is to get a conversation going so that you can meet up with someone in person. Look at the profile and comment on something subtle, a detail that not everyone would notice. Use a touch of humor. For example, if a man is always looking away from the camera in his photos, you could say, “I see you like pictures where you’re peering off mysteriously into the distance. I’m dying to know what’s out of frame!” Or if someone’s profile mentions a love for the show The Office, message with your favorite Michael Scott quote. (You can steal my personal favorite: “Make friends first, make sales second, make love third. In no particular order.”) Show that you’ve put effort into your opener.
And for goodness’ sake, send a message when you match with someone! Why are you swiping if you’re not going to follow up?
You have a life to live. Don’t stare at your screen all hours of the day and night. Even if you have a super-busy day, try to set aside fifteen minutes to respond to messages, maybe during your commute or when you’re procrastinating at work. You want to keep the momentum going.
Get to the actual date as quickly as possible. The point of the apps is to meet people face-to-face, not to gain a pen pal. I’ve seen over and over the negative consequences of messaging too much before a date. When people text nonstop before a date, they end up creating a fantasy of each other in their minds (#themoneteffect). When they meet up, the person is inevitably unlike the fantasy, which leads to disappointment, even if they would’ve been a good match otherwise. Great text chemistry doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll vibe in person. Wouldn’t you rather figure that out sooner?
A good transition from texting to a date might sound like this: “I’m really enjoying this conversation. Want to continue it over a walk on Sunday afternoon?”
Make it easy to meet up. One way to do this is to propose a specific day and time for your date. “If you’re as charming in real life as you are over text, we may be onto something. Drinks Thursday? Seven p.m.?” You may have to go back and forth to find a time that works for both of you, but this way, you start to narrow down your options. It kills the excitement and momentum when you spend so much time scheduling.
And sometimes that happens. It’s not necessarily from lack of interest; people are often just busy. What’s the best way to move from an online chat to an in-person date after a lot of back-and-forth texts? I recommend calling out the situation, but in a kind and playful manner. “I really enjoy our text banter and would love to see if we get along this well in person. What do you think about a quick drink this week?”
Or the next time they start to tell you something interesting: “Wait, wait, wait. I need to hear this in person! When are you free this week to meet up and tell me the rest of this story?”
Look, I know this is hard. It may feel like the universe is against you, designed to confuse you and keep you from finding love. But there’s hope. If you want a break from the apps, the next chapter covers how to meet people in real life. Yep, IRL. It’s still possible, even if you’ve given up on that ever happening. And in the chapter after that, I’ll help you find ways to make dating fun again. Imagine that.