How to Answer the "My Simple Pleasures" Prompt on Hinge

Answer it with two or three small things you genuinely enjoy, named exactly. Not coffee, not sunsets, not a good book. The bakery you walk to on Saturday morning, the podcast you save for the drive home, the hour on Sunday when nobody needs anything from you.

That is the whole job. She should finish reading it and know one true thing about how your week actually goes.

The word simple makes men reach for the smallest, most universal thing they can think of, and universal is exactly the problem. A pleasure that belongs to everybody belongs to nobody.

She has read coffee about forty times today. She has read sunsets, fresh sheets, and the first sip of a cold beer. None of it is wrong. All of it is furniture, and furniture gets scrolled past.

Then there is the second failure, which is the man who writes something enormous. Watching my nephew grow up. Sitting with my thoughts at the end of a long day. Sincere, probably true, and impossible to reply to without sounding like a greeting card.

Three things, and you can check all three in about ten seconds.

They can be pictured. A reader should be able to see it happening: where you are, roughly what time it is, what is in your hand. "Good food" fails that. "The dumpling place two streets from my flat, on the way home from the gym" passes it.

They are true. Not impressive, true. A man who writes something he wishes were true is going to feel it on the date when she asks about it and he has nothing.

They leave a door open. Something in there should be askable. A place she has heard of, an opinion she might argue with, a habit that sounds slightly odd.

Men treat this one like a form field and dump six items in, separated by commas. It reads as a shopping list and it flattens every item on it.

Two is usually right. Three if one of them is very short. What you lose in coverage you get back in detail, because two things with a clause each are far easier to respond to than six bare nouns.

There is a rhythm that works well here: one ordinary domestic thing, one thing that places you somewhere specific, and if you use a third, one that is a bit strange. Cold showers and old maps. The last twenty minutes of a long drive. Peeling the label off a bottle while somebody else talks.

One of your two should be something two people could do together on a Tuesday evening.

This is quietly the most useful move available here. If you write that the best part of your week is the noodle place near the station, you have put a plan in her head without asking for anything. When the chat gets to the part where somebody suggests something, it is already sitting there.

Do not force all of them into date shape. One is enough, and it should be the one that is genuinely true, not the one that sounds like a good outing.

Read your answer back in your own voice. If you would not say that sentence to a friend in a pub, rewrite it.

The failure sounds like this: "Simple pleasures: a crisp autumn morning, good conversation, and laughter that makes your stomach hurt." Nobody talks like that. It is written for an audience rather than for one woman.

This is closer: "A cold morning, the walk to work with a coffee I did not make myself, and the ten minutes before anyone emails me." Same idea, said by a person.

Short sentences help. So does cutting the first three words of whatever you wrote, which are almost always warm-up.

This one is a texture slot, not a headline slot. It is where she finds out you are an actual man with a normal life, which matters more than most men think, because the rest of the page is usually trying hard.

So let the other answers do the heavier lifting. If one of your answers takes a side and another tells a small story, this one can be the quiet one. Three loud answers in a row reads as a performance.

Check that it does not repeat anything else on the page either. If you have already mentioned the gym twice, keep it out of this one.

Show it to somebody who knows you and ask one question: does that sound like me?

If they say yes and then tell you an extra detail you forgot, you are done, and you should probably put their detail in. If they pause, or say it sounds fine, it is furniture and it goes back.

The second test is simpler. Read it and ask what somebody could write to you about it. If the honest answer is "nice", the answer is not finished. If the honest answer is "wait, where is that", it is.