Gone are the days when you had to lie about meeting your significant other through a dating app. As smartphones have transformed the way we look for love, swiping left and right to choose a potential partner has gradually become the new normal. But with so many people searching for a soulmate on these apps and sites, how can you stand out from the crowd? These expert tips, inspired by advice from the app-creators themselves, will improve your chances of matching with the right person.
This dating app isn’t afraid to be a little elitist and prioritize quality over quantity in its singles network. This is a members-only space, meaning new users fill out an application, and the app chooses the best candidates.
First impressions matter, and nothing makes a better dating-profile impression than a great photo. As you set up your profile, take your time choosing shots that show off your looks and hint at your personality.
At the very least, you need a couple establishing shots that potential matches can use to recognize you when you finally meet up in person. Look for at least one good close-up of your face and one more distant snap that shows a fuller view of your body. In these photos, your features should be clearly visible, so avoid images where sunglasses cover your face or you have completely different facial hair. In addition, don’t try to fool the viewer with old photos—stick to snaps dating from the past few years. You should choose your default photo from one of these shots.
In addition, you can include more than just two photos (although you don’t want to go overboard with too many). Once you’ve established what you look like, dig up some pictures of yourself cuddling a pet or participating in a hobby you enjoy. World travelers, this is the time to show off those vacation shots. Just make sure you’re in them—you don’t want long-distance shots where you can barely be seen, or random images where you don’t appear at all.
You can also include a photo of yourself hanging with friends, but be careful with these: If a potential date doesn’t even know which face in the frame belongs to you, they’re likely to move on pretty fast. Avoid blurry photos with too many faces, and don’t make a group shot your default image.
Finally, bear in mind that you might not make the best judge of your own face. When you’re choosing between pictures, ask one or two close friends for advice on the images that show you in the best light.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the text of your profile is still important. According to Tinder exec Rosette Pambakian, men are 98 percent less likely to get a match if they leave their bios blank. Even if you’re the loveliest person in the world, a missing bio—or a terrible one—will not grab the attention of the matches you want.
Some apps give you room for a full-length autobiography, while others limit you to a line or two. No matter how much space you’re working with, you should start by thinking about what your personality is like and what unique traits make you different from other people. Also look at other profiles to see what types of descriptions pique your interest. Then invest some time and effort into describing yourself, your hobbies, and your goals. As with photos, getting a friend to look over what you’ve put together can flag any potential problems.
Unfortunately, we can’t give you a magic formula for a great bio. But we can point out some things to avoid: Generic openers, too much boasting, and attempts at awkward humor. You should also avoid making your profile run too long—viewers have short attention spans, so they probably won’t read your whole life story.
In addition, remember to follow the rule of “show don’t tell.” Instead of describing yourself with a long list of adjectives, Match.com recommends talking about what you do and which activities you enjoy. If you’re altruistic, talk about your volunteer work; if you’re an adrenaline junkie, mention your latest foray into sky-diving. Then potential suitors will be able to judge whether you’re “funny” or “adventurous” for themselves, rather than requiring that you spell it out explicitly.
Oh, and if you find yourself bouncing around an app for several months or years, remember to update your profile to keep it relevant. If your profile still references your 2014 road trip as if it’s recent history, other users will get the impression that you’re not actually on the site very often.
Once you’ve created an awesome profile, it’s time to start looking for partners. With the sheer number of people using these apps, picky daters could genuinely scroll through their options looking for their perfect matches forever. In fact, that overwhelming number of possibilities can distract you from the awesome profiles that are right in front of you.
According to eHarmony, many users find a match after taking a chance on someone they hadn’t originally considered. Perhaps they had ruled out this person as not fitting their ideal criteria, such as fitting into an age range or sporting a certain hairstyle. To find the right person, these users had to venture outside their dating comfort zone.
While you should go into your search with a general idea of the type of person you’re looking for, bear in mind that the more restrictions you put on a potential future partner, the harder it’ll be to find them. So if you haven’t been able to find a good match with your current criteria, it may be time to broaden your search terms. While you’ll still need to balance between being too picky and not being discerning enough, a little flexibility can make all the difference.
If you find yourself on the dating scene for an extended period of time, you may get tired of your current app. However, you should still keep your profile up to date, and while you’re at it, remember to regularly log in, run searches, and send messages. Even if you’re not seriously looking for love at the moment.
Why bother? Just like the Facebook algorithms that determine what appears in your News Feed, dating-app algorithms take in every like, swipe, and chat you submit. Every action you take on a site or an app reveals more about your preferences and allows you to receive more likely matches. Conversely, when you fail to check the app regularly, it will stop sending accurate or popular profiles your way.
These smart algorithms even extend as far as looking at how many unread messages languish in your inbox. So keep your account in good standing and participate regularly. This will increase your chances of striking it lucky in the near future.
Once you’ve settled into a rhythm with your dating app, check out all the features it offers. Otherwise, you might miss out on useful tricks for finding good matches.
In Tinder, for example, check out the Edit Profile section of the app to find options like the ability to import your Instagram photos directly into your profile. To spread your Tinder profile’s reach, you can also create a web version of it, then share its URL in email messages, on social networks, or even on your business card. Within the app, tap your profile icon on the top left, select Settings, scroll down to the Web Profile heading, and choose Claim yours.
In general, you should check out the FAQs on dating apps’ websites to learn more about improving your experience with that specific service. OKCupid, for instance, encourages you to improve the quality of your matches by answering a series of questions about yourself and the type of person you’re looking for. To feed this data into the OKCupid algorithm, tap your profile icon (the portrait), then scroll down to Questions, where you can choose to Answer or Skip any that appear. Once you’ve answered more than a dozen or so, you unlock a new Personality Traits section for your profile. This tells visitors how you rank against the general OKCupid population in various categories like friendliness, politeness, and spirituality. You might get a green arrow for above-average artiness, for example, or a gray arrow for below-average adventurousness.
If you’ve exhausted all your options in a popular app like Tinder or OKCupid, and you’re still not finding the people you’d like to date, consider a specialized app more suited to your needs. Maybe try Bumble, where women rather than men must make the first move. Those who like in-person meetups might create a profile on Huggle, which attempts to match you with people who hang out in the same places—say the bar or the gym—as you do. Believers can find apps that cater to specific religions. And if you’d like to limit the amount of swiping you do per day, consider Coffee Meets Bagel, which delivers a small selection of pre-selected matches every day at noon.
What about subscription-based versus free apps? The data suggests that finding the right site and persevering with it is more important than whether or not that site happens to be free. So test out a few services (paid-for apps often offer free trials), and then commit to the one you like best.
Serendipitously running into your life partner at the local watering hole, at the office, or in school used to be 'how it is done,' but this style of old school romance is largely gone from our lives. Modern dating is largely a low-stakes, high-reward game of swiping right in search of love (or, at least in search of someone to pass a few hours with on a Friday night).
Apps like Tinder and Bumble are typically blamed for a 'dating apocalypse.' Every so often, the algorithm spits out a keeper, but ask your single friends about their dating-app dabbles, and the nightmare stories typically outnumber the true romances. But a new study suggests things aren't so bleak.
Comparing couples who met on dating apps with those who met offline or on dating websites, the researcher found those who met on dating apps were just as happy as the other couples. Further, these couples differed from the other couples in one key way: They had stronger desires to start families than those who connected offline.
Among the main takeaways:
Why it matters — Study author Gina Potarca is a post-doctoral researcher at the Université de Genève. In a statement accompanying the findings, she explains this new insight is especially good news during a pandemic that discourages bumping into strangers in person. It may also spell a more hopeful outcome for the future of courtship in the digital age, she says.
'It is reassuring to dismiss alarming concerns about the long-term effects of using these [dating] tools,' she says.
The study was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.
Here's the background — Digital dating today is a far cry from the web-based dating platforms of the mid-90s. Instead of the lengthy profiles and OKCupid-style surveys designed to narrow down the pool, app-based dating platforms apply game theory to the process. Matches are driven by split-second compatibility decisions, based primarily on profile pictures. Swipe right to connect, swipe left to reject.
Anecdotal evidence abounds that this new way of dating has led to a rise in casual 'hookup' culture at the expense of longer term commitments. But as Potarca explains in her study, these criticisms may be more pearl-clutching than reality.
'Despite amplified media attention, we are yet to have nationally representative evidence on whether relationships initiated on swipe-based apps are different compared to relationships started in other contexts,' says Potarca.
'Till now, surveys that measured where couples met have been scarce, and when such data existed, the sample of couples formed through dating apps was usually small.'
What's new — To get a better understanding of how these relationships play out in real life, Potarca turned to a 2018 Swiss survey which had 3,245 respondents who met their partner in the last 10-years. Combining these data, which spanned relationships started between 2008 and 2018, with dating data from 1995 to 2007, Potarca sought to see how answers to specific questions had changed over time, like: 'Do you intend to marry your partner within the next two years?” and: 'To what extent are you satisfied with the relationship with your partner?”
What they did — With these data collected, Potarca focused on how couples who met either offline, on dating websites, or on dating apps responded to questions of relationship satisfaction, intention to live together, a desire to marry, and whether they planned to have children together in the near future. She also looked at how couples using these different platforms might differ in terms of socio-educational status, age, and geographical distance from one another.
To understand how these trends might change across generations as well as platforms, the respondents were grouped by age — 18-29 years, 30-39 years, and the over 40s.
What they discovered — Potarca found the Swiss couples surveyed still primarily met through friends, although the trend was in 'slow decline,' with at least a quarter of new relationships in the last two years started online.
See also: Love and lust: Why men on Bumble aren't ready for the queen bee
Couples who met on an app were actually more likely to want to live together than those who met the old-fashioned way offline, Potarca found. This trend seemed to be driven, at least in part, by the desires of women using dating apps, who were more likely than those who met offline to be interested in marriage and starting families with their partners.
Interestingly, while couples who met on dating apps reported being just as satisfied in their relationship and similar over-all well-being to those who met offline, couples who met on a dating website had the highest levels of satisfaction, Potarca found.
'This implies that among digital tools for dating, websites and their options for more refined searches may indeed represent a better way of finding a well-matched partner,' she writes in the study.
When it comes to expanding your dating pool both demographically and geographically, dating apps have the upper hand.
Couples who met through dating apps were more likely to date partners with different education levels and to date partners 'long-distance' (who lived at least 30-minutes away.)
What's next — While this study offers comforting evidence that the kids are alright, actually, Potarca says future studies with larger data samples, as well as more refined criteria for analysis, are needed before we can come to any firm conclusions about how dating apps have changed the game of love. For example, this current study fails to address topics such as political orientation and religion, and its sample of same-sex couples is too small to suggest significant trends in non-heterosexual couples.
Potarca says future work could also benefit from tracking the full range of partnership choices — from casual hook-ups to committed long-term relationships — to better understand how likely it is for casual encounters had via dating apps may transform into longer-term relationships.
Abstract: Within the span of almost ten years, phone dating apps have transformed the dating scene by normalizing and, according to some voices, gamifying the digital quest for a partner. Despite amplified discussion on how swipe-based apps damage the fabric of intimate ties, scientific accounts on whether they have led to different relationship patterns are missing. Using 2018 survey data from Switzerland, this study provides a rich overview of couples who met through dating apps by addressing three main themes: 1) family formation intentions, 2) relationship satisfaction and individual well-being, and 3) assortative mating. The data indicate that in Switzerland, dating apps have recently taken over as main online dating context. Results further show that couples formed through mobile dating have stronger cohabiting intentions than those formed in non-digital settings. Women who found their partner through a dating app also have stronger fertility desires and intentions than those who found their partner offline. Generally, there are no differences between couples initiated through dating apps and those initiated elsewhere regarding relationship and life satisfaction. Though more data are needed to capture the full range of users’ romantic and sexual experiences, current results mitigate some of the concerns regarding the short-term orientation or the poor quality of relationships formed through mobile dating. Findings finally suggest that dating apps play an important role in altering couple composition by allowing for more educationally diverse and geographically distant couples.