How to Write a Dating Profile Without Sounding Like Everyone Else

You sound like everyone else when you describe yourself in categories: adventurous, funny, loves food, loves to travel. You stop sounding like everyone else when you describe an actual week, because nobody else has lived yours. The fix is not better adjectives. It is collecting specific details from your ordinary days and putting two or three of them on the page.

Open a dating app and read ten profiles in a row. The words repeat. Someone loves hiking, someone loves brunch, someone is looking for a partner in crime. None of it is false, and none of it is useful, because she cannot picture anything.

A template feels safe because it cannot be wrong. That is also why it cannot work. If a sentence would be equally true of a thousand men, it tells her nothing about you, and she skips it without noticing she did.

The test is simple. Cover your name and photos, then ask whether a friend could tell the profile was yours from the words alone. If they could not, you wrote a template.

Most men sit down to write a profile and try to produce it in one sitting from memory. Memory gives you the highlight reel, and the highlight reel is the same for everybody: a trip, a hobby, a favorite restaurant.

Ordinary days hold the good material. So for one week, keep a note on your phone and add a line whenever something small happens that you would tell a friend about. Do not judge it yet. You are collecting, not editing.

At the end of the week you will have fifteen or twenty lines. Most will be useless. Four or five will be better than anything you would have invented.

A good detail is something she could see or hear. It names a thing, a place, a person, or a number.

"I love cooking" is a category. "I make the same bad curry every Sunday and I am slowly getting less bad at it" is a detail. The second one also shows you can laugh at yourself, which the first never could.

A few places to look in your own week:

• What you do on a Tuesday night when nothing is planned.
• The thing you are oddly stubborn about, like how to load a dishwasher or which route is the fast one.
• A skill you are in the middle of learning badly.
• A regular spot where the staff know your order.
• A small project that is taking you far longer than it should.

None of these sound impressive. That is the point. Impressive is a category too.

The temptation once you have a list is to use all of it. Resist it. A profile with eleven details reads like a résumé and gives her no place to start.

Choose two or three that are different from each other. One about how you spend a quiet evening, one about something you are bad at, one about where you like to go. Together they sketch a person. Any more and the sketch gets crowded.

Then ask of each one: could she reply to this? A detail she can ask a question about is worth three that she can only nod at. The curry line invites "what is in it?" without you asking for anything.

Read your draft out loud. Anywhere you would never say the sentence to a person across a table, change it.

Men often switch into a stiff voice when they write about themselves, with phrases like "I am a driven individual who enjoys" doing the opposite of what they intend. Say the plain version instead. "I work in logistics and I like it more than I expected to" is a sentence a real person says.

Keep the sentences short. If one runs past two lines, split it. A short, plain profile signals that you are comfortable with yourself, and that is more attractive than any list of qualities.

Claims are the quiet killers. "Funny," "easygoing," "ambitious," "great listener." She has no way to check them and every man writes them.

Replace each claim with the detail that would make her conclude it herself. Do not write that you are easygoing. Write that you have eaten at the same noodle place every Friday for three years and still order the second thing on the menu because the first was sold out once. She will decide the rest.

If you cannot find a detail that backs a claim up, delete the claim. It was filler.

The words and the photos have to describe the same man. If the profile says you are always out trying new restaurants and every photo is taken at home, one of them is lying and she will trust neither.

Look at your two or three details and ask whether any of your photos show them. You do not need a photo for each one. You need nothing in the set that contradicts them.

Sometimes a man does all of this and the profile is still dull, because his week is quiet and he cannot see what is interesting in it. That is common, and it is not a verdict on him. A friend reading your notes will spot the good lines you skipped past, so hand them the list and ask which ones made them smile.

Either way, the work is the same: stop describing categories and start describing a Tuesday.