What does your online dating profile say about you?

Your communication goes beyond your messages

I’ve written in previous articles the importance of the online dating photos you choose and the bio you write. Upon first viewing your profile, those are the only two elements that girls use to determine whether they’d be open to responding to a message from you and, eventually, meet you in person. On Tinder you can post “moments” that give your matches further insight into your life.

But the burden to convey a dateable image isn’t squarely on your shoulders as a man; the dynamic works both ways.

If I check Tinder and my feed says I have 20 moments, odds are that at least one of them will be a selfie with the caption: “bored. someone message me.”

First: I don’t want to be the thing you resort to because you’re bored. The best relationships are the ones where you feed off each others’ positivity, not the ones where you combat each others’ boredom.

Second: I don’t want to vie for the attention of a match with all the other guys who descend upon this bored girl’s profile. It’s like the Tinder equivalent of a bunch of sperm cells racing for the egg, except the sperm cells are a bunch of guys looking for easy lays. I don’t want my messages adjacent to theirs if I can help it.

“We wanted to give our users a better way to get to know their matches and communicate with them,” Sean Rad, Tinder founder and CEO, told Time Magazine last year upon introducing Tinder moments.

But Tinder users, male and female alike, don’t appreciate the way their moments, among other aspects of their profiles, contribute to the lasting impressions their matches form about them.

Here are some comments from Reddit users about what makes a good Tinder moment.

The good:

• “I just posted my dog. Just got a quick like. Dog works.” Cheap but effective.
• “Pictures from where I work. I’ve gotten around 30 likes on all of those, even posting multiple in a day. Granted, my view is pretty sick.” Whatever helps generate positive impressions.
• “Something witty/funny, etc.” Such as …
• “One time I posted a pic of some cookies I made with the text ‘That’s right ladies, I can also bake.'”

The bad:

• “I tend to be bored by the typical shirtless mirror selfies or shots of you and your friends drinking at a bar.”
• “i usually just go with a selfie captioned with “netflix and chill?”, 60 percent of the time, it works every time.”
• “The only moment I’ve ever sent out was me flexing my back in the mirror. It’s a double douchebag photo.” At least he admits it.
• “I have taken one moment ever. It was a literally a picture of the vent on the ceiling.”
• “I’ve always heard food is a good one to go with.” Not really, unless it’s something out of the ordinary.