Why Your OkCupid Profile Is Not Showing

Usually one of six things. Your settings and hers do not overlap, or your account is disabled. Incognito may be on, or your main photo broke a rule. OkCupid may still be reviewing the account, or your Looking For answers may be so narrow that almost nobody qualifies as a match. All six are checkable in a few minutes, and the first one explains most of the cases.

OkCupid shows your page only to logged-in members. Beyond that, a woman sees you only when her settings and yours fit each other in both directions. Your age, location, gender and orientation settings have to fit what she is looking for, and her settings have to describe you.

That is the part men miss. You can set a wide range for the women you want to see and still be invisible to them, because they set their own range. Nothing is wrong with the app. The overlap between the two sets of settings is just thin.

A disabled account is hidden from other people until you log in and confirm you want it back. If you disabled it once to take a break and never reactivated, you have been invisible ever since.

Log in on the app, follow the prompt to reactivate, and check that the page appears again afterward. This is the quickest fix on the list, so do it first.

Incognito is a paid feature. When it is on, your page is hidden from everyone except the people you have liked or messaged.

Men sometimes turn it on to look around quietly and forget about it. If you are paying for it, check whether it is still switched on. A man who is hidden from the whole app and wonders why nobody likes him has usually found the answer.

OkCupid requires your main photo to show your face clearly. A blank image, a stock picture or someone else's photo can lead to a ban as a fake account.

Look at your first photo the way a stranger would. If your face is covered by sunglasses and a hat, or you are a speck in a group shot, fix it. This matters beyond the rule. A woman who cannot see your face has nothing to say yes to.

OkCupid says new or flagged profiles and messages can be held while it reviews them to confirm a real human is behind the account. During that time you may not appear the way you expect.

You cannot hurry a review, and opening a second account to skip the wait is not a fix. The useful move is to make your page look like a real man's from the start: clear face photo, answers filled in, and no sign of a copied or generic page.

The Looking For settings shrink both who sees you and whom you see. Tight age bands, tight distance and a stack of dealbreakers can leave a small city with a handful of eligible women.

OkCupid's own advice is to widen those settings and add more information to your page so more people see you. Go through each setting and ask which are real dealbreakers and which are guesses you made once and forgot. Loosen the guesses and see who turns up.

A different problem looks like the same one. If a woman you matched with disappears, OkCupid says she may have blocked you, deleted her account or been banned.

You will not be told which. Do not message her from another account, and do not take it personally. People remove themselves from apps for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Being seen is only the first step, and the real work starts after. A page that appears but gets no response has a photo or words problem, not a settings problem.

Put your best photo first, show your face in daylight, and fill in answers that say something specific enough to picture. Then message women with one real detail from their page. If you have been visible for a couple of weeks and nothing happens, a coach can look at your photos and your openers together and tell you which one is losing you replies.