Do you find it interesting that people spend three weeks perfecting their resume to start applying for jobs but spend 10 minutes writing their online dating profile? Do you find it interesting that most people could deal with resume rejection without taking it personally however not having a lot of success online, something they put much less effort into, is something that they are taking personally?
Your online dating profile is so important and it deserves time and energy to be spent on it. Most people struggle to put their profile together, articulate what they want and select their photos. Users often choose the images they feel they look best in, and don’t think much more about their choice.
The images you present on your online dating profile are so important!
We have such an incredible opportunity to not only talk about ourselves but show ourselves. Pictures, and this is an age-old saying, genuinely tell 1000 words. Most online dating platforms have the capacity for six images, this is 6000 words that you can share with other online dating users to help you stand out and try and attract the right person for you that will align with who you are, your lifestyle and your interests. Images have the power to tell us so much. They have the power to ensure we make great quality connections and they also have the power to deter the wrong people for you.
It’s always important to be transparent when you’re online dating because most of society has things that they will accept and things they will not accept. We all know what we want, so it’s not a big deal to minimise the pool of people available to us because of our specific wants and needs. I would much rather show my true self on my online dating profile and perhaps get just three matches in a week because these people have responded to what they’ve seen, and are interested enough to want to communicate further which then allows me to have quality conversations. Alternatively, I could match with 20 people in a week, spend some time talking to some of them, feel frustrated and overwhelmed at the number of conversations that are happening with so many different people and realise that a lot of them I am incompatible with because of very basic and specific things that really should have been indicative on my profile, to eliminate being matched with in the first place.
Let me ask you, are you looking further than just how attractive they seem in the images? Are you paying attention to the activities, settings, and environment they’ve presented to you in these images? We are often shown indicators of who people actually are, we just miss them because we don’t stop, think and analyse. I know when your sifting through hundreds of profiles a week, it’s easy to develop a habit of just having a glimpse through the profiles and keep swiping, but this is why we’re tired. This is why we’re over it. If we pay more attention to what we’re being presented with, take our time and decide accordingly, we will be less tired than we feel now.
We generally flick through profile photos and make a judgement on the attractiveness of that image or the setting of that image and there is not much more to the thought process. I’d love to challenge you. Say you went onto a dating profile and all six images they included were of them doing fun, outdoorsy, activities of some sort. Would you then deduce that this person lives quite an active life, enjoys doing things most of the time, is adventurous, likes to keep busy and is quite active simply from their images? If you are paying attention to more than what the person looks like in the picture, then you should have. If you are someone who enjoys their downtime, a lazy Sunday at home and you like to enjoy your life but don’t like to be so switched on all the time, then it’s ideal that you swipe left. If you read the full story that the profile told you. If you didn’t read the full story and they were attractive, it’s likely you swiped right. You probably matched, but it isn’t actually a match. Just a mutual decision of swiping right.
Say someone has 4 out of 6 images of them out in a club or party setting, perhaps with a drink in their hand, indicative of a party lifestyle. You are a homebody, do not go out drinking, do not go out often and have no desire to date someone who does go out frequently. Are you going to look at this standard and commonly used theme of images, which are likely attractive, and decide that this person has clearly depicted themselves and their lifestyle as very social, drinks and goes out often, and that this does not align with you? Enough for you to decline this option? Or would you rather match and initiate conversation, only to find out that he likes to party, likes to drink, likes to go out a lot, for you to then either ghost, unmatch or simply reject because those aren’t things you enjoy? But you actually already knew these things.
It is likely for us to do the second option and not the first, even though those were all things his profile already told us before we had a conversation.
This is not the process we should be taking. We should not allow ourselves to have that meaningless conversation just to find out something that the profile already indicated to us. This is why so many of us are feeling online dating fatigue. This is why so many of us are over the online dating experience. This is why so many of us are not getting to the point where we are meeting people that we are compatible with online, we are letting our patience run out with people we should have never swiped right on.
Pay attention to what the profile is telling you, their pictures need to be interpreted by you enough for you to make a quality judgement. Your worth is not determined by your match rate. Your worth is not determined by your success rate. Your ability to successfully online date is not determined by the results that you are currently garnering from online dating.
It’s not you, it’s your profile.
Photos count, make them important.
Let me leave you with a small task. Go on your online dating profile, look at the images you’ve selected, enter a third-party mindset and decide what your profile photos say about you and the person that you are. If you’re happy with the narrative your images share on your behalf, that’s great! If you think that you can specify your personality more on your profile through your images, we’re ready to help.