A profile is an invitation to a conversation, not a CV

The points below about dating profiles are ordered by how much difference they make, not by how often they get repeated.

Specific beats appealing

A profile saying you like travel, food and laughing describes almost everybody and gives nobody anything to say. A profile mentioning a specific dish you make badly, a place you go every Sunday or an opinion you will defend gives a stranger an obvious opening. The measure of a good line is whether someone could reply to it without inventing something.

This single shift accounts for most of the difference between profiles that get conversations and profiles that get likes.

Photos should carry information

A useful set shows your face clearly, your full appearance, and you doing something that indicates how you spend time. Group photos as the lead image, heavy filtering, sunglasses in every shot and photos more than a couple of years old all reduce trust rather than increase appeal. One clear, well-lit, unedited face photograph does more work than five artful ones.

The shot people most often lack is one taken by somebody else at ordinary conversational distance, which is the only kind that shows how you look to a person standing in front of you.

Filter deliberately

A profile that appeals to everybody attracts a large volume of poorly-matched conversations, which is the main cause of app fatigue. Stating something that will not suit everyone — how you spend weekends, whether you want children, what you are actually looking for — reduces matches and improves them.

Fewer, better conversations is the outcome worth optimising for. The cost is worth naming honestly: a filtered profile goes quiet for stretches, and the urge to soften it back into something universal usually arrives during the first quiet week.

Say what you are looking for

Ambiguity about whether you want something casual or serious wastes time on both sides and generates most of the resentment in modern dating. Stating it plainly is occasionally awkward and consistently more efficient.

It also filters out people who are hoping you will change your mind, which is a category worth filtering. Phrases like seeing where it goes are read as agreement to whatever the other person wants, so two people can use the same words for months while meaning opposite things.

Lists of what you do not want read differently to a stranger

A profile that leads with the things the writer is tired of describes a run of past disappointments rather than the person reading it. The reader has no context for the complaint, so what they take from it is information about your recent history instead of information about you. The same requirement stated as a preference filters just as hard without that effect, because what you want excludes exactly as much as what you refuse.

The exception is the small set of things you genuinely will not negotiate, which are clearer stated flatly than hinted at.

You are allowed to want something different from what is described here.

Write like you speak

Profiles written in an unfamiliar voice produce a mismatch the moment a conversation starts. Reading it aloud is a reliable test — anything you would not say out loud generally reads as performed.

In practice, humour that is specific to you works; generic jokes copied from elsewhere are recognisable and common. Prompts answered in the tone the app suggests produce the same flattening at scale, which is why profiles on one platform tend to sound like each other rather than like anybody in particular.

Everything above, in order of what to do first

1. Specific beats appealing. A profile saying you like travel, food and laughing describes almost everybody and gives nobody anything to say.
2. Photos should carry information. A useful set shows your face clearly, your full appearance, and you doing something that indicates how you spend time.
3. Filter deliberately. A profile that appeals to everybody attracts a large volume of poorly-matched conversations, which is the main cause of app fatigue.
4. Say what you are looking for. Ambiguity about whether you want something casual or serious wastes time on both sides and generates most of the resentment in modern dating.
5. Lists of what you do not want read differently to a stranger. A profile that leads with the things the writer is tired of describes a run of past disappointments rather than the person reading it.
6. Write like you speak. Profiles written in an unfamiliar voice produce a mismatch the moment a conversation starts.

The takeaway

Give somebody something specific to reply to, and let the profile put people off.

The right person will not need you to be strategic about it.