10 Devastating Mistakes You're Making on Your Tinder Profile
Are you hoping your next swipe right results in more than disappointment? You're not alone.
While a Tinder profile is often used to find hookups, your chances of finding lasting love may be better than you think. In fact, the app's PR team claims to be responsible for over a thousand engagements. Even Hillary Duff is reportedly looking for someone to share a pizza with on the app!
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Whether your idea of a Tinder success story is a wedding announcement or a blissful, no-strings-attached makeout session in the corner of the local bar, poor success with the app doesn't mean you're undateable. You could be one of the millions of women using the app making mistakes with their Tinder profile. Are you guilty of any of the following?
1. Too Many Group Photos
Remember, for most Tinder users, impressions are made in first seconds. You earn right or left swipes based primarily on your first photo. Many users don't actually open up your profile to read your bio or explore your other snapshots. Ensure that your first photo on the app isn't a group shot. If it's impossible to decipher which of your friends is you based on your first picture, you may be earning ill-deserved left swipes.
2. Too Few Photos
Tinder users are provided with the potential for five photos. That's a lot of space for illustrating your lifestyle, appearance, and interests. While you don't necessarily need to max out your photos, uploading additional shots can certainly offer more insight into who you are. It's also likely to yield more matches, too!
3. It Doesn't Reflect Who You Are
Your snowboarding pictures taken last winter at Vail may be a bit misleading if you were dragged there under duress by your parents. If your matches are trending toward adventurous types and your idea of an outdoors excursion is rooftop mimosas, it may be time for an images makeover. Regardless of how indoorsy or outdoorsy you are, be sure that your Tinder pictures are reflective of you and your real world interests, whether that's bookstores, dive bars, music festivals, or art museums.
4. You Have Photos with Your Ex
Do you have photos taken with an ex? Then you are definitely giving the impression that you're either not single or you're very much not over your last love. Both are pretty undesirable to prospective matches.
The same goes for photos of any duo, even if it's just a friend. No one can really tell if the other person in your photos is your ex-boyfriend, your current wife, your brother, or your favorite coworker. They just see you with a potential rival. Always strive for as many solo photos as possible.
5. Obvious Photoshopping
Using photo-editing tools to trim off 40 pounds or drastically change your appearance won't do you any favors in the long run. It's disingenuous at best.
However, obvious photoshopping used in an ironic manner? That's entirely different. Photoshopping your own head onto a meme or a block of cheese can display your sparkling wit in a way that's just endearing.
6. Too Many Silly Selfies
There's nothing wrong with one or two flattering or ironic selfies. A little duck face or mirror action never hurt anyone's chances of maximizing their Tinder matches. If all five photos of your photos are oddly angled selfies, it's probably not helping. Opt for at least one full body shot, and strive for a variety of activities and settings to portray you as what you are—a fascinating, lively prospective date.
7. You Don't "Like" Enough Facebook Pages
Heavy Facebook users have an automatic advantage over their friends who prefer Instagram and Twitter. Common Facebook likes are displayed to your prospective matches, giving you instant topics of conversation if you share a favorite author, band, or neighborhood bar. If you've typically kept your Facebook fan pages to a minimum, it may be time to consider a switch to fan girl status, even if it's just temporarily.
8. Not Being Clear about What You're After
Looking for a hookup? No judgment. While Tinder started out as a no-strings-attached app, it has quickly evolved into much more. If your idea of a great time looks more like sushi and rock climbing than kissing in the back of a cab, say so. Be clear. By expressing that you're looking for a boyfriend or a hookup, it can maximize your chances of finding someone who's after the same.
9. You Don't Show Your Face
For many of us, online dating is risky business. The awkward potential of being seen by our coworkers, managers, friends, and family is very real and very uncomfortable. However, avoiding showing your face isn't necessarily the best tactic and certainly won't result in an abundance of well-qualified prospective dates. If anonymity is a must, we recommend obscuring part of your face—or picking another dating platform entirely!
10. Your Bio Is Blank or Wasted Space
Will explaining that you grew up in Phoenix, studied in Nashville, and now live in New York, all done with cutesy airport abbreviations, offer insight into your personality? Unlikely. Your Tinder profile bio matters. Whether you choose to fill it with humor, interests, or preferences in matches is entirely up to you. Just be sure it's reflective of who you are and what you're after.
When meeting someone from Tinder or any other online dating platform, exercise common sense. Always scope out prospective matches on social media before your meet-up. Arrange to meet in a public place, and be sure that at least one trusted friend knows of your plans. Have fun, be safe, and happy swiping!
Okay, confession time. Are you guilty of any of these (or other) Tinder profile mistakes?
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JOYEUX NOEL
On Dating Without The Drink
Why do grown men who are obviously NOT still funneling beer or drinking from the keg tap seem shocked that I can live my life happily without booze? Last night, for instance, dinner with a car battery manufacturing plant manager. Granted, he was British, so perhaps what got lost in translation from American English to British English was that no drinking also meant no drinking beer. In our online chatting, I’d mentioned that I didn’t drink and he didn’t ask why, but did say he enjoyed “a beer” with dinner as a way to unwind from the tribulations of plant managing, so what did I do to unwind?
“I sell myself for crack,” I joked, because obviously crack is passé.
He wrote back: ;) ;0
As a recovering (six years) binge drinker (see: concentrated alcoholic), I don’t usually mind a date having a drink or two if the evening stretches into a few hours of convivial conversation with dopey, teasing gazes across the table and foot bumping under. However, based on my own history of chugging beer and wine in my very younger years and then hooking up with man-boys similarly drunk who didn’t know my name the next day but did know that my vagina was a dark, untended garden (see: the dark ages before Brazilians, bedazzling, and labiaplasty), I don’t trust that a man desires me if he downs more than one or two drinks. Or rather, that tipsy and horny, that he does desire me, in that beer-goggle way, and mostly just my secret lady garden.
“What do you want to drink?” the waitress asked.
“Water,” I said, “with lime.” (The lime transforms it into a flirty, sober cocktail.)
British man, and he was a man at 46, said, “Yuengling. A pitcher.”
A pitcher. Now, I get that he was British, and a pint equals a pitcher at the pub, but this was a first date on a Tuesday night at a sad Mexican restaurant. Nobody else was getting their fiesta on in the booths around us, though one man at the bar watched Nascar while eating the free chips and salsa.
"You really don’t drink?" he said. "Not even a glass of wine with pasta?" He poured out the first of four consecutive beers.
"I'm a much happier, much nicer, less embarrassing date without it," I said. "For instance, I won't throw up in your mouth when you kiss me."
He looked at me with equal parts horror and skepticism, but then he said, “So I get to kiss you.”
Therein lies the reason why so many men (though my recent return to dating has only been with eight men, so not definitive) seem to want me to drink with them. At the end of our awkward first dates, when they walk me to my car, there is that moment when they step close, closer, closest, and I think: Please don’t try to kiss me, inebriated, gropey gorilla. But he thinks: My chance! And since we’re both lit maybe she’ll kiss back, maybe she’ll invite me to her secret sex palace, maybe I’ll see her still-mostly-untended lady garden. (This is why I rarely let men pay for dinner on the first date. It sets up the uncomfortable expectation of in kind exchange: You pay for my tacos and I give you a snog.)
I get greasing the wheels. It’s how I got through all of those awkward first hook-ups as a teenager and college student, and how I mostly shed my sexual inhibitions during my marriage. Tipsy? I made racy comments in my date or husband’s ear, feigned a confident striptease, and whispered, “Yes, now and there and harder.” False boozey bravado. Drunk? No need for pleasantries and not even, always, my consent.
So I ate my tacos and watched as he gulped down one beer after another. And then the moment when his buzz kicked in. Sobriety makes me acutely aware of the shift. He got a little louder, his laugh a little harder, and his comments a lot bolder. No longer chatting about the technicalities of battery manufacturing, he wondered if I still had my Catholic school uniform and maybe I would put it on for him later.
“That was 26 years ago,” I said, emphasizing the juvenile and adult phases of our lives.
And when I came back from the bathroom? (Yes, I took my cell phone to text a snarky message to a sober friend: Battery Acid Table 6.) He was holding on to his yet-again empty glass and said, “You’ve got some really long legs.”
I didn’t bother to pretend to laugh. “I was this tall in the sixth grade,” I said. “Boys were afraid of me.”
He walked me to my car, lingering close. When I turned to give him a rudimentary, platonic hug, he first tried to suppress his belch (but how could he?), and then second, with determination, kissed my lips.
Many of my sober, single female friends report similarly fending off drunk advances by dates, or incredulity on the part of dates over their seltzers with a meal, or—and this, too, has happened to me—the date decides you (anti-party girl) and your sobriety are their buzz kills even when all you are doing is eating chips and salsa on a Tuesday night at the empty Los Amigos.
But here’s the thing, guys: sobriety has taught me to be secure in myself and decide with clarity and gusto what I want to do with you and when I want to run away from you. I won’t pretend that you are the world’s greatest drunk lover or fake my own drunk orgasms. And if we kiss in the parking lot of Los Amigos, you will know that I kiss you back because it is you who has gotten my chemistry roiling and not the 4.2% alcohol content of a pitcher of beer.
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