The dating app companies will never admit it, but online dating is hard. They set expectations implying “millions of beautiful women at your finger tips”, when in reality if often looks like endless swiping only to match to with people you’re barely attracted to.
Don’t you feel like it should work better?
In a city like Austin that’s growing faster than almost any other city in the country, you theoretically should have an abundance of new dating options all the time, especially with the power of the internet.
This city is one of the hottest places to be in the United States, with tourism exploding and millions of women traveling through each year. So— in theory— dating apps should be the ground ball of meeting women.
But here’s the truth:
Though app give massive volume of potential connections, they are inherently limited because they do not give much information about who you actually are. By design, that part of getting to know someone becomes reserved for texting, calling, and the eventual date. On these platforms, nearly all of initial attraction is determined by your photos and with short attention spans, you have a fraction of a second to catch someone’s attention.
In that first moment, your photos are everything.
This isn’t to say bios or prompt answers don’t matter, they definitely do.
But by and large, photos serve as a prerequisite on these apps for your would-be-match to even consider your reading your bio. And furthermore, if you actually want to match with any of the Top Picks, you’re going to need to maximize all of these factors.
Here’s some uncomfortable stats:
The male-female ratio on Tinder, for example, is 75% men to 25% women making it harder than ever to stand out. Additionally, surveys have found that on dating apps, men see 50% women as below average in attractiveness whereas women see 70-80% of men as below average in attractiveness. This seeming contradiction of the meaning of “average” illustrates a very important point: “average” is not attractive.
Partly, this phenomenon is because women are hard-wired by evolution to be significantly more picky than men because of the possibility of pregnancy. In the midst of hookup culture, these effects are exaggerated.
However another major reason for this is also because most guys are just not representing themselves well at all. Mirror selfies and group photos with 10 of the boys are not only basic, but do not show you in your best light. Many men choose their pics by scrolling through the last 3 years of their camera roll to find the most “acceptable” six photos. Does that sound like a recipe for success?
I’ve seen first hand the way many girls swipe through profile after profile, showing each other and sneering at guy after guy’s same cringey photos. It’s not pretty.
There’s no way around it: if you actually want results from online dating, you have to put in real effort and do the right things.
In business, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, you won’t make a single sale if you don’t invest into the marketing. It’s the exact same for dating. Your dating profiles and your social media are literally your digital marketing channels for the product of you.
You could be having casual adventures you won’t forget for the rest of your life. You could meet your soulmate. You don’t want your life partner and future mother of your children to swipe left on your half-ass profile do you?
That’s actually what’s at stake here, and most guys simply aren’t treating this with the importance and urgency that it deserves.
Now upgrading your dating profile is not going to be a magic pill. It’s still on you to text, call, and go on dates in order to seal the deal. But it will get your foot in the door with girls you never would have matched with before. It’ll expand your options to the point where you might even have trouble even responding to all your matches.
And that’s a great problem to have.