Dating Pointers

Over the past three or four years, I’ve probably read more than 10,000 profiles of men and women looking for dates through dating services. Most were pretty boring. Many were frustrating. A very select few brought a smile to my face. Three I still remember, and talk about, today.

And of those 10,000 dating service profiles, only a dozen actually intrigued me enough to make the first move, which with those dating services is usually some sort of free, generic ‘flirt’ or ‘wink’ to get the respondent’s attention. So what are the worst offenders when it comes to writing an Internet dating profile for the dating services? Let’s jump right in to number one:

1. “I’m the One Your Mother Warned You About”
Why this is one of the most overused phrases in online dating?! I cannot share how exasperated I get when I read these words in a dating service profile – all I want to do is roll my eyes and yell at the screen, “Yeah, and the seventeen other guys before you!” I’ve been known to even block people whose profiles string together these eight words. Obviously, it irks me.

Now, perhaps this line, in the dating service users mind, anyway, serves a purpose. It can tell a potential suitor that the person whose profile they are reading is ‘dangerous’ and ‘mysterious’, without actually coming out and saying it. But I think there are a million more inventive ways of saying the same thing, without saying the same thing as everybody else.

2. “I Might Be the One you’re Looking For”
You might be the one I’m looking for, this is very true. But by putting this in your dating service profile (or using it as your introduction line), doesn’t tell me, or any other potential suitor, anything new.

What this line does tell me, however, is that the dating service profiler didn’t do a lot of thinking about how they wanted to present themselves. I would rather know something concrete about the profiler, such as what gets their eyes twinkling or whom they emulate on a daily basis. Telling me that SOMEONE MAY be SOMETHING to me is hard to wrap my head around, and will be for a stranger perusing dating service profiles too.

3. Wasting Space (To Have Enough Words in the Profile to Post)
Most dating services require a certain number of characters or words posted in a dating service profile in order for the rest of the users to view it. Unfortunately, many people don’t bother to fill the space they have with anything useful to the reader.

“Don’t know what to say at this moment” was the entire written dating service profile of a 31-year-old gentleman in Toronto who instant messaged me with a “hello” on a well-known dating service. Another 24-year-old male in Montreal’s profile says, “Not sure what to say here really. I am just looking around.”

Not taking the time to actually write something worth reading is one of the worst mistakes you can make when writing your dating service profile. Just a little bit of attention to your dating service profile can garner huge results - no attention guarantees no responses.