How to improve your dating profile

Most people judge a profile by the first photo and the first prompt, then decide whether to keep going. So the first two slots carry most of the weight. Your first photo should show your face clearly, in decent light, doing or near something that looks like your life. A plain headshot against a wall is fine. A blurry photo from a trip where you are a small figure in the distance is not.

Then look at the rest as a set. If every photo is the same kind of shot, she learns one thing about you. Mix a clear face shot, a full-body shot so she knows your build, one with friends (not so many that she can't tell which one you are), and one that shows an activity. Cut any photo where she has to guess which person you are, or where the best thing in the frame is someone else.

The prompts do the work the photos can't. A good answer contains something specific enough that she could ask about it. "I make a very average lasagna and I'm proud of it" gives her a question. "I love good conversation" gives her nothing. Replace abstract claims with a real example, a story in one line, or a small opinion she might disagree with.

Keep answers short. Two lines is usually enough. If the prompt asks for a fact, give the odd one, not the safe one. Avoid anything that reads as a list of traits, and avoid answers that only make sense to you. Read each one out loud and check whether a stranger would know what you meant.

Profile changes are easy to make and hard to judge. Make one or two changes at a time so you can tell what helped. Keep the old version somewhere so you can compare. After about two weeks, look at the rough numbers the app shows you, such as likes or match rate, and compare them to the period before.

If nothing moved, the problem may not be the profile at all. It could be your filters, the time of day you are active, or the pool of people you are seeing. Check your settings, then decide whether the profile needs another pass or whether you should just wait longer before judging.