Let me answer the question posed in the headline straight away: YOU MUST HAVE A TINDER BIO.
There is literally nothing that will have me – singlechicka92 – swiping left faster than someone who reckons they don’t even need to bother to tell me the first thing about themselves on a dating profile. While a picture may speak a thousand words, do you really want to be dismissed based entirely on the way you look? Or would you rather be able to pretend handsomed00donboat94 rejected you because your personalities/interests seemed incompatible?
I know I prefer the latter, because I spent plenty of time picking the exact right pictures to show that I take fire selfies, have teeth and a full head of hair, have never met a lion and don’t wear sunglasses all the time.
Still: a good dating app bio isn’t some free-for-all where you tell everyone all your fears and anxieties – save that for year #2 of the relationship. There’s a craft to it. A sense of shaping your public persona for max <3s.
Feelin’ overwhelmed by the pressure of distilling your essence into a 25-word description? Here’s some handy guidelines:
Tell the truth, but not the whole truth.
Keep it brief – 25 words or less/a few sentences – and don’t make stuff up for lolz or to impress strangers. The best way to keep a stranger at a distance is to tell them lies upon lies, and no one wants a squeeze who they can’t trust to be honest with them.
What I’m saying is, if you wanna find love on the line, you want to be honest about who you are without being weird and needy – which is admittedly very tough to do. You want to give them a sense of who you are and what you’re into: maybe say what you do for a living, mention a hobby that’s not frickin’ terrifying, and do so naturally: so speaking like you would to a buddy you haven’t caught up with for a while.
But you also want to keep a little sense of mystery – because all the fun of the early parts of a romantic dalliance is in the getting to know you game. You don’t want to go straight in telling someone you don’t know at all that sometimes when you talk in your sleep you’re subconsciously confronting your absent father. That is too much too soon. By all means share that gem one day, but we’re in the wooing process guys: at least pretend that you are only 60% as neurotic as you actually are.
Dial down your emoji game, but up your joke quota.
Please don’t be the guy who uses too many emojis. It’s intense and it makes me uncomfortable. If you must use emojis please use them sparingly. Don’t use them to overcompensate for a lack of personality.
Examples of emojis that no one gives a fuck about/are incredibly disconcerting: your national flag, a syringe, $$, the tongue-poking out emoji, any fruits that correspond to sexual parts, the jizz one, the clown, I could go on and on.
Speaking of personality: you want to double your joke/pun limit. Incorporate puns and light-hearted humour as much as you possibly can, and replace any negative language, i.e. “Don’t talk to me if you like…“; “I hate girls who…“; “I want to murder…” with daggy jokes about Napoleon‘s armies, the fish that ran into a wall. Everyone says they want a partner with a sense of humour – and that humour has to extend beyond sexual references in emoji format. Be better.
Make pop culture references for maximum bants.
The easiest way into a bloke’s heart is through his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Harry Potter franchise.
While it is defs too much to just make a series of references to the one cultural reference you understand – see the cringeworthy-ness of calling yourself a ‘Ravenclaw’ in your dating bio – it is for sure worth making a specific reference to the zeitgeist.
So don’t be vague and say that you’re into music and books and sport or whatever. You want to be particular about that music, those books, that sport. No one likes “all music” and we should stop pretending that we do. But you can’t go too vague and in-depth either: rather than talking to a wanky genre of lit or music or theatre or prestige TV, pick one show and drop in a sneaky reference to it. A little easter egg for the keen-eyed viewer, something that a fellow [insert reference here]-head would chuckle to themselves and think, ‘Gosh, I’d sure like to hang out with her.’ Even if it’s a dated reference like M*A*S*H. Girls go wild for M*A*S*H.
End your bio with a call-to-action.
This feels very corporate jingo, so let me clarify. You want to give your reader something to respond to. Why? Because it helps you sort the chaff from the sweet, sweet corn.
First you’ll be able to know for sure if someone took the time to read what you had to say: you know from the get-go if they’re the type of person who’s judging you on how clothed you are in pics – beach pics, just out of shower selfies etc – or if they want to have an intelligent convo at some point.
Second it’s kinda nice that you’re giving someone the chance to open a chat with something that’s not “Hey, what’s up?” Instead you’re posing them a question or a challenge. And third, you get to judge ’em on how they measure up to it.
An example: mine was “Tell me about the last gig that gave you feels.” You immediately find out if your potential date likes the same tunes as you, is into seeing live music, and thus if you have compatible interests or ways of speaking. If they tell you off by saying that ‘feels’ isn’t a real word, they can get in the bin because they’re wrong, and you probably didn’t have much in common anyway. But do be prepared to answer the question yourself, and to try to stop yourself from drooling should this help you uncover your tru luv.
