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It is widely accepted that there are two things you have to be ready to do if you are going to go online looking for your soul mate, or even just a date: Post a photo of yourself, and describe who you are. Each of these can be daunting, for many reasons. Primary among them, in my view, is that both tasks have multiple and competitive goals. On the one hand, you want to portray yourself in the most attractive manner possible. After all, by definition, you are trying to attract someone. You may be hoping that suitors will read your profile and reach out to you, or that when you send a message to someone you are interested in, he or she won’t read your profile and post it in a “can you believe this??!” blog or e-mail it to friends.
On the other hand, if you are like most people, you also want to represent yourself honestly. Although stories both true and mythical abound about the lack of honesty among dating profiles and online daters, I can personally attest, based on my own reading of some tens of thousands of profiles and my contact with several thousand married couples who have met using such profiles, that people are for the most part honest to a fault in their profiles. The problem is that many people honestly don’t know how to describe themselves.
Similarly, we cannot hope to tell you what it is that honestly makes you who you are (without seeing your answers to a couple hundred questions that we may have already asked you to answer). Also, it wouldn’t be helpful for us to tell you what concrete observations could be made to raise the chance that a profile will generate communication (we do want you to be honest). However, we can help you with something perhaps equally important: what types of things should you try NOT to say when describing yourself honestly and enticingly. Yes, science is ready to weigh in, if not heavily, at least helpfully, we hope, on the subject of what types of things seem to be dampers when it comes to eliciting communication via an online profile. The list is perhaps surprisingly brief.
Thing 1 Not to Say: Anything that you can’t Spell or Punctuate Correctly
This may seem a bit Miss Crab Applish, or Felix Ungerish, or whatever current entertainment icon represents OCD behavior, but the single most common complaint from women about men’s profiles is that they are misspelled and/or illiterate. I’m not sure if this represents an evolutionary bias against stupidity, but there is a notable gender bias here. So, gentlemen, if you want to make the least amount of effort that is most likely to increase your profile appeal, reread it for spelling. If you truly can’t spell, I recommend that you cut and paste your profile sections into a word processor or e-mail application with a spelling feature and then return the corrected results—although watch for synonyms if you do this. If you don’t know what a synonym is, you don’t need to worry about this.
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