Content Is King

According to her findings, writing long and elaborate dating profiles is actually detrimental to online dating success. In fact, the most popular men and women were far more concise, using 97 words on average. Now while you don’t necessarily want to restrict yourself to an arbitrary number you do want to keep things short and to the point. The web is increasingly the domain of shortened attention spans; unless the content is extremely compelling, the longer a person spends on an individual page decreases proportionally with it’s length2. TL;DR isn’t just a Reddit joke, it’s how many people treat online interactions.

So take the same advice that every editor gives aspiring writers: kill your darlings. A well-written dating profile is a well-edited profile and that means being willing to take a hacksaw to it. Be as verbose as you want when you write it… then take another pass and slash it to the bones. Having restrictions can work to your advantage; it means you can’t afford to fuck around. If you’re going to try to keep it to 97 words per section, then by Zod you want them to be the best 97 words possible.

Moreover, how you write is equally important. Not only do you want to write in complete sentences with proper grammar, but you want to make sure you’re using optimistic language. One of the keys to online dating is to be as approachable as possible and there’s nothing more likely to turn a prospective date off than being a bundle of negativityplaining, whinging, even deprecating humor all reads as a giant sign that screams “DO NOT DATE”. There is not a woman in the world who’s dream man is somebody who sits around grousing about how life is unfair and the world sucks and by the way, would you like to touch his penis? (mais…)