How to Answer the "What Makes a Relationship Great Is" Prompt on Bumble

Write one specific thing that makes a relationship great in your own life, as a scene or a habit with a little edge, not a list of nice qualities. In a live Bumble profile review, a student answered with flirting, a great connection and good eye contact. Our coach called it okay: it is not polarizing and not clever, but it takes nothing away. An answer that takes nothing away also adds nothing, and the prompt is worth more than that to your profile.

The rest of that student's prompts got the same treatment: a little too obvious and cliche, and nothing that made them stand out.

On the same call, our coach reviewed another student whose photos had improved a great deal over the weeks he had been working with our coaches. He said so first. Then he turned to the prompts and called them a little soft, a little logical, a little too nice and not polarizing.

Two of that student's answers show the problem clearly. One said that if a woman likes romance she will love him. The coach called it basic and boring, because a lot of men would say something close to it, and a little self-qualifying besides. Another said he gets along with cute women who have a positive personality. The coach's reaction was one word: duh. In theory that is who everybody gets along with.

A good test follows from this. If a hundred men could paste your answer onto their own profile, it is not an answer yet.

On another live review, the coach hit this exact issue with a different profile. The man had written that he wanted an independent and affectionate woman. The fix was to drop both broad words and give one example of each: a woman who can coldly fire a man at the office but cuddles with her boyfriend at night. His line was to paint a picture instead of giving a list.

Apply that to the relationship prompt. "A great connection" and "good eye contact" are the same kind of broad words. Pick one and show where it happens. For instance, the long dinner where neither of you checks a phone says more than the word connection does, and it hands her a scene she can picture and answer.

Our prompts lesson is clear that a prompt is not good by itself. It is good as a vehicle for an attractive trait of yours. This prompt is a gift for that, because "what makes a relationship great" is really "what do I value and how do I act."

The lesson also says the prompts worth writing are the attention-grabbing or polarizing ones. A polarizing answer is read, and a bland one is skimmed. That does not mean being rude. It means taking a stand a reasonable woman could disagree with, so the ones who agree feel something.

Bragging helps here too. The lesson points out that bragging about yourself unprompted reads as try-hard, while the same quality stated in response to a prompt reads as less forced.

One correction comes up in nearly every review: show, do not tell. When a student wrote that he was kind but edgy, the coach asked what he does that is kind and what he does that is edgy. His own sketch was a man who helps an older woman across the street and then does something tough and cutthroat at work.

The relationship answer works the same way. If you write that loyalty makes a relationship great, you have told her a word. If you write what loyal looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, you have shown her a man.

Another student wrote a confident bad-boy intro. Every prompt under it described a nice guy with a few quirks. The coach pointed out the intro was incongruent with all of them, and that claiming a trait is not the same as being it.

Read your relationship answer next to your photos and your other prompts. If one says warm and the others say sarcastic, a woman will believe the stronger signal and wonder about the weaker one.

Our coaches tell students to write five or six answers for the prompts that interest them, then cut to the best three. Compare them on two questions: which are inherently better, and how do they work together? Most profiles are built from about three prompts, and each should convey a different thing about you.

If you cannot decide between two answers to the same prompt, run one for a while, switch to the other, and see whether your results change. For this prompt, write the version with the scene, the version with the stand, and the version with both, and keep whichever one you would be happy to be asked about on a first date.