What Are Prompts on a Tinder Profile?

Prompts are questions you choose and answer on your Tinder profile. Tinder calls them Profile Prompts and describes them as a way to show your personality and give the other person something to start a conversation with. Tinder also encourages fuller profiles, pointing out that adding photos, a bio and prompts can help you do better. If you opt in, its Photo Insights feature can even suggest prompts based on your camera roll.

You pick a question from Tinder's list, write your answer, and it sits on your page alongside your photos and bio. The questions are there to do the hard part for you. Instead of staring at an empty box, you are answering something specific.

Tinder's own framing is worth taking literally. A prompt has two jobs: show her who you are, and hand her an easy first line. An answer that does only the first is a small speech. An answer that does both is an invitation.

Before you spend an evening on wording, be honest about the order of things. Photos do most of the work on a dating app. If they are not earning a second look, she never reaches your prompts, however clever they are.

So get the photos right first. Once they are bringing in decent matches, your prompts start to matter a great deal, because they are what turns a woman who likes your face into a woman who writes to you first.

Most weak prompt answers fall into one of two ditches.

The first is the try-hard player. Lines that brag, lines that are openly sexual, lines that read like a pickup artist wrote them. They make her feel she is being worked on, and the women you want move on.

The second is the needy nice guy. Reviewing one man's page, a dating coach picked on a familiar ending: a list of hobbies followed by "let me know what you do for fun." He called it almost needy friendly, the tone of someone trying very hard to be liked because he is worried he will not be. Listing hobbies, he said, is something almost everybody does, and it does very little. The gym, travel and new restaurants are not bad things to enjoy. They are just what nearly every man writes, so they tell her nothing.

The answers that work sit between those two. Relaxed, a bit playful, and clearly written by a specific person.

My advice on what belongs in a profile is simple. Put in the things that are emotionally relevant to her, and the things that show what dating you would actually be like. Save the job-application facts for later.

In practice, that means one concrete detail with a little attitude. For a question about your weekends, "up early for a run, then undoing all of it at a taco place my friends are sick of hearing about" beats "I love brunch and the outdoors." She can picture it, and she can reply with her own taco opinion.

A good test is whether a woman could write to you using only your answer. If she could say "which taco place?" or "that sounds like a lie," the prompt is doing its job. If the only possible reply is "nice," rewrite it.

If you opt in, Photo Insights can suggest prompts based on what is in your camera roll. That is genuinely handy when you are stuck, because it starts from your real life rather than a blank page.

Treat a suggestion as a starting point, not a finished answer. Keep the subject it found, the dog, the trip, the band you saw, and then rewrite the words so they sound like you talking. A prompt that sounds like software wrote it has the same problem as one that sounds like every other man. Nothing about it is yours.

Prompts are cheap to test. Swap one answer, leave everything else alone for a week or so, and see whether more women start writing to you first or mention the new line when they do.

Change one thing at a time, so you know which change did the work. And if you cannot judge your own answers, show your page to a friend who will be blunt, and ask which line they would reply to. The one they pick is usually the one to keep.