How to Tell Whether Your Photos or Your Messages Are the Problem

Most men fix both at once. New photos, new opener, a rewritten bio, all in the same weekend. Then the next month comes out slightly better or slightly worse and there is no way on earth to tell which change did it.

There is a faster way, and it takes a week of counting rather than a weekend of work.

Your account does two separate jobs, and they fail in two separate places.

Your photos and your profile do one job. They get a stranger to swipe right. That job is finished the second she matches, and nothing you write afterwards can go back and improve it.

Your messages do the other job. They turn a match into a plan for a specific evening. That job does not begin until she has already decided you are worth a look.

Because the two run one after the other, the failure shows up in exactly one of two numbers, and the numbers do not overlap.

Open a note on your phone. For seven days, write down two numbers.

The first is roughly how many of the women you liked matched you back. You will not get this exactly right and you do not need to.

The second is how many of your matches ended with a specific plan. Not a good conversation. Not a number swapped. A day, a place and a time that both of you agreed to.

That is the entire exercise. A minute a day, and at the end of it you know which half of your account is broken.

Few matches, and the ones you get turn into plans at a reasonable rate. Your photos are the problem. She is barely finding a reason to swipe, but once she has, you handle the rest fine.

Plenty of matches and almost none reaching a plan. Your messages are the problem. Strangers like what they see. Something between the match and the ask is losing them.

Few of both is the harder read, and it usually still means the photos come first, because you do not have enough matches to judge your texting on. Ten matches a month is not a sample. Fix what she sees, get the match number up, then look at this again.

Plenty of both, and your account is not the issue. Whatever is bothering you is happening at the table rather than before it. That is a different problem with a different fix.

It is almost never all six of them. It is usually the first one, and the first one is usually not the photo you like most.

Put a clear shot of your face in daylight at the front. Cut the two weakest. Get one taken by another person, outdoors, where you are doing something rather than posing. Add one that shows what a Saturday with you looks like.

Leave the bio alone for now. The bio rarely loses a swipe, because she reads it after she has half decided already.

Then find where they die, because for any given man it is always the same place.

Three usual spots. The opener that goes nowhere: "hey" and "how's your week going" get a polite answer and then silence, because there is nothing in them to answer. The pleasant nothing: four days of easy back and forth about work and weekends, both of you agreeable, no evening on the table. Those feel like the good conversations, and they are the ones that quietly die. The ask that never comes: you wait for a perfect moment to suggest a drink, no such moment arrives, and you keep texting until she stops.

Read your last four conversations and you will find yours. It will be in all four of them.

This is the part men skip, and it is why the last three months taught you nothing.

Change one thing, give it two weeks, then count again. New first photo, same messages. Or the same photos, but you ask for the drink on day two every single time. One change at a time is slower for a fortnight and much faster over a year, because at the end of it you actually know what your account does when you move something.

For a lot of men the honest count comes back the same way every time. The photos are thin, the conversations go pleasant and nowhere, and there is no evening this month to spend on either one.

That is the case where handing the whole thing over is the fix, because both halves get done by the same people. Our team redoes the photos and the profile so the match number moves, then runs the conversations in your voice so the plans actually get made, and keeps running it. Your first date within a week, or we keep working. Your part is showing up.

Either way, do the week of counting first. It costs nothing, and it is the only thing that tells you which half of your account has been the problem the whole time.