What to Write When You Hate Writing About Yourself

The empty bio box is not a confidence problem. It is a question problem. "Tell us about yourself" is a terrible question to ask anybody, and the men who stare at it longest are usually the ones being most honest about that.

You do not need to get better at self description. You need to stop attempting it.

Asked to describe yourself, you go looking for a summary, and a summary of a person is always either a lie or a list of adjectives.

Funny. Easygoing. Ambitious. Down to earth. Every one of those is a claim about how you come across, which is the one thing you are least able to judge and she is least able to verify. So you write one, read it back, feel like a fraud, delete it, and conclude you are bad at this.

You are not bad at it. You are trying to do a job that cannot be done. Nobody can describe what they are like to be around, and the men whose bios sound great did not manage it either. They wrote about something else.

Here is the question that works: what did I actually do in the last month.

Not what do I like. Not what am I into. What did I physically do, on a specific day, that took up an hour or more. Write down five of them, plainly, with no attempt to make any of them sound good.

Rebuilt the brakes on my bike. Drove four hours to my sister's for a birthday. Finished a video game I have been at since spring. Cooked the same curry three times trying to get it right. Watched an entire series about deep sea fishing for no reason.

That list took you four minutes and it already contains more of you than a paragraph of adjectives ever will.

Now take one and write it down the way you would say it to a friend. That is the whole technique.

"Cooked the same curry three times trying to get it right" is already a bio line. It does not need polish. It has a person in it, it has a small amount of stubbornness, and it gives a stranger something concrete to picture.

Compare it to "I love cooking," which is what you would have written under the old question. The first one is a scene. The second one is a category that ten thousand other men claim this week.

You want two or three of these, not ten. A profile of five specifics reads as a man trying to prove something. A profile with two reads like a man who happened to mention them.

Most of your five will look boring to you, and that judgement is not reliable. You have been you for a long time and everything you do looks ordinary from the inside.

The deep sea fishing series is funnier than you think. The four hour drive for the birthday says something about you that no adjective could have said. The bike brakes tell her you are the kind of man who fixes his own things, which is information.

The rule is not to find something impressive. It is to pick the ones a stranger could not have guessed from your photos. Anything she can already see is wasted space.

If the box is still empty after all of that, stop writing and ask two people who know you one question: what is something I do that you find funny or annoying.

You will get answers you would never have produced yourself, because they are describing you from the outside, which is exactly the view you do not have. Half of what they say will be usable almost word for word.

This feels awkward for about ninety seconds and saves a week of staring at a blank field. Men who hate writing about themselves are often perfectly happy to repeat something a friend said about them, and the line is better anyway.

Three habits show up in almost every bio written by a man who hates writing bios, and each one makes the problem visible to her.

The apology. "I am terrible at these" or "never know what to put here." She now knows the first thing about you is reluctance, and she has read it on twenty other profiles today.

The joke that replaces the content. A one liner in the bio box is a way of not answering, and she can tell. Keep the joke if it is good, but put something real under it.

The list of requirements. When the self description is too hard, men switch to describing her instead. Nobody has ever read a list of what a stranger wants and felt chosen.

Sometimes a man does all of this, ends up with three honest lines he actually likes, and the account still does nothing.

That is usually the giveaway that the words were never the weak part. The photos were taken in a two week stretch years ago, the order they sit in was never thought about, and the lines are now good writing attached to a set that does not support them. Fixing one of three things and expecting the account to change is how months go by.

The version that settles it is having the whole thing rebuilt at once: a full new photo set and every word rewritten across the apps you actually use, put together as one piece rather than six fixes made on six different nights, then handed to you to run from there.

Either way, do the four minute exercise first. The list of five things you did last month costs you nothing and it is where every usable line in your profile is going to come from.