Hello, darlings. Ever wondered why your dating profile only attracts nerds and perverts, and never the really desirable guys like myself? The likely truth is that it contains some simple and elementary error, and with hundreds of potential matches vying for my attention, that alone is enough to make me throw it on the slushpile. But all is not lost. As a seasoned dating-site pro, whose own profile has captured the attention of literally a dozen flakes and washed-up divorcees, I feel confident in sharing with you a few of my trade secrets. If your profile contains any of the following offences, remove it immediately:
By which I don't mean photos of ugly subjects, since if you're ugly, there's not much you can do about it. I mean those photos which are artistically misconceived, technically deficient, or dishonest. If you include a photo on your profile, it should be of you and you alone, centred on you, looking the way a potential date might see you. It should not be one of the following:
Most of you go astray when you come to mention your interests. Now I don't actually expect very much from the interests section; we most likely have nothing in common anyway, but that won't necessarily stop us having fun for at least a short while. But I do expect, as a minimum, that the interests you list are things you are actually interested in, and that you've mentioned them for a reason. This is not the case for any of the following:
These are not interests, but activities you are hard-wired to perform or desire. You might like cuddles, for instance &mdash who doesn't? &mdash but you're not interested in cuddling. You don't meet random people, get talking, and say "Oh, you like cuddling too? We should cuddle sometime!" You don't swap tales of your favourite cuddles. You don't attend cuddling conventions, you are not a connoisseur of cuddling. Listing "cuddling" as an interest tells me that you're probably not interested in anything, and hence not very interesting yourself.
Are you sure? Think: are you really interested in movies? If you really like movies, then:
If any of the above are untrue, then you don't really like movies. Instead, you just like to pass the time by watching movies, and any old shit (or more likely, any new shit) will do. A real interest requires a bit of passion and energy and effort and discernment. You're not interested in movies; you're just a passive consumer.
The same holds for music. If by "I like music" you simply mean that you like to put on the radio and have chart shit on in the background when doing something else, then I'm afraid you don't actually like music and you've been deluding yourself all your life. Sorry.
Seriously, what kind of man are you hoping to attract with this information? This is the equivalent of me saying "I like Warcraft III, military history, and lesbian porn". I would be quite frankly afraid of the dates I'd lure with that kind of bait, even if those were my interests; and the same should go for you and yours. We all have some passions we are simply not going to share with our lovers, some interests which are entirely unrelated to the sexual attractiveness of a potential partner. The hotness of my date, as a rule, has absolutely nothing to do with how much she knows about tanks.
A danger of putting such interests on your profile is that there are plenty of men out there who think that the way to your heart is to feign an interest in Sex and the City, shopping, fashion and such like. They will spend entire days trailing after you in malls, and entire evenings watching crap TV on your couch, wondering all the time why they still aren't getting any action. There are several names for such men: nerds, "eternal best friends", "nice guys", clueless drips. But they all have one thing in common: you'd rather join a convent than sleep with any one of them. If you wonder why your mailbox is clogged up with such dorks, just look at your interests list. You reap what you sow.
Many profiles contain such tired old cliches that I have to skip past them very quickly.
No you're not. If you write this on your profile, you are guaranteed to be one of the following:
For most people this is true, but you, on the other hand, can eloquently be summarized as "Next!"
What a vacuous thing to say. I don't know how anyone with a sufficiently developed consciousness could claim to "love life". The life you love depends on the slavery of dozens of people less fortunate than yourself, you fucking airhead, and the policies you support cause the death and misery of thousands of people every year. It's only your extreme shallowness and ignorance that lets you say such a thing: if you had a note of awareness or dignity in your head, you'd spend every waking moment in a deep depression.
But all that said, I suspect that the lady doth protest too much. "I love life!" is the claim of someone desperate to create an appearance of sanity, someone morbidly, maniacally addicted to "happiness"; it's the sign of a catastrophic breakdown waiting to happen. And I don't want to be there when it does.
Leave out the old "sense of humour" crap, please. You don't want a guy with a sense of humour. The fact is, when faced with a good-looking guy, you'll laugh at anything he telegraphs as a joke, even if it's as funny as an enema and delivered with all the timing of an Amtrak express train. And when faced with a guy with a sense of humour, you'll be more interested in the good-looking guy sitting at the next table.
And anyway, in case you haven't noticed, here's a newsflash: there is no good-looking guy with a sense of humour. No good-looking guy has ever been funny, ever, apart from me of course, and arguably Michael Palin. Good-looking people simply aren't funny. A sense of humour requires, as a basic prerequisite, that one develop a sense of one's own absurdity. And good-looking guys are always way too far up their own arses to develop any such thing.
Even if you sent me that scrawl by text message, I'd fucking dump you. On a fully-featured keyboard, it's inexcusable.
If there's one thing worse than people who laugh out loud at their own shitty jokes, it's people who inform us of the fact in AOL-speak. One "lol" and I'm out of there faster than you can say "stfu".
Okay, this point is a lot more idiosyncratic, but I can't help making it....
It's nice to warn us upfront about the cats, I suppose, in the same way it's nice to warn us you're a typhoid carrier. "Love me, love my dog" is good advice for any relationship, and advice I personally subscribe to, but I'm afraid I can't extend the feeling to other species, especially not cats, which are remarkably stupid, heartless, uncaring, fickle and ungrateful animals. Which is not to say that I refuse to love a cat-lover; but I will warn you in advance that there will come a stage when either me or Felix has to go, and it will probably be me.