Scientifically Dating – A Guest Blog

Anyone can feel lonely, whether socially isolated or not. But having a partner can help to reduce those feelings of being alone (depending on the partner!)

As a fellow lover of science, my brother researched how amending his online dating profile could maximise his chances of meeting the right person (it worked, he met his wife!)

I don’t believe in fairy tales, but I do believe in science. Here is his scientific love story…

Jenna, thank you for letting me hijack your blog.

When I was 26 I found myself single again. As hard as it was, I took comfort in having a good job, a great social life and being healthy, and just assumed the next relationship would come along soon after.

It turned out that a single life in my late 20’s was not what it was in my early 20’s. My friends were all getting married, they were starting to have kids, I had increased responsibilities in work that took up more of my time, and finding other singles was more difficult than I’d imagined.

So like and tech savvy millennial would do, I turned to online dating. But I stumbled at the first hurdle of constructing my profile. How many pictures should I use? Is that nice one with my sister okay? Should I just crop her out?

The text was even harder. How do you completely capture everything you do, how you think, the kind of person you are, and the kind person you’re looking for, all in a couple of paragraphs?

This obviously wasn’t going to be easy either. Eventually I settled on some pictures, cobbled some semi-coherent sentences together, and began emailing potential suitors. The online dating platform was good enough to tell me when they had viewed my profile, but told me nothing about why they decided not to reply.

Clearly my profile wasn’t working and I had some research to do. What surprised me was just how difficult it was to find good online dating profile advice. Sure, there was tons of advice about what not to do, but these served only to add constraints to what already felt like a difficult task.

Eventually I did start to uncover some golden nuggets. For example, when someone checks out your profile, they are often looking if there is any reason not to date you. Including 10 images of yourself in all sorts of scenarios is therefore more likely to work against you than for you. Surprisingly, you are better off restricting yourself to just 3 pictures; 1 close up, 1 showing your full torso, and maybe 1 involved in your favourite activity. That’s it.

Excitedly I took some new pictures, re-wrote my text following all the steps I had found and bingo! I received more emails in one evening than I had in the previous several months combined. It didn’t stop after one night either. I was now receiving enough emails each week that searching and making the first move was optional.

As you might have guessed this story has a happy ending, in fact it has two (like a sausage). I am now married thanks to online dating (happy ending number 1), but for several years I’ve felt guilty for not sharing what I found. None of the steps I followed were difficult, in fact they were common sense once I thought about them. I have therefore taken the liberty of creating what I hope is an easy to follow step-by-step guide to improving your online dating profile (https://mystandoutprofile.com/the-steps/), in a hope they serve you as well as they did me (happy ending number 2).

Enjoy, and good luck!

Dave