Holly's Dating Tips for Guys Part 4: What Bowerbirds Can Teach Us about Online Dating

Throughout the animal kingdom, it’s pretty well established that males learn some special skill and learn it damn well if they ever want to get laid. Male bowerbirds in New Guinea build elaborate little houses, expending considerable energy scavenging their surroundings for the brightest colored objects with which to decorate their little home. They are notorious for stealthily stealing prized ornaments such as bits of broken glass from other nests to knock down the competition. Researchers have even found a few that have gone so far as to chew up flowers and grass to make a kind of paint they spit out to spruce up the place. When a female approaches to scrutinize his decorating prowess, he goes into a tizzy, flittering about the place, and tossing down to her his most prized possessions. (I took an animal behavior class in college—it was awesome.)

It’s argued that females reserve themselves since the costs borne to them in reproduction are obviously higher. The bowerbird who constructs the brightest, best-constructed little bower is going to get the girl because he’s proven himself in several fields apparently important to the survival bowerkind: scavenging, territorialism and color theory. His genes are demonstrated and the little female bowerbird rests easy knowing her offspring will likely demonstrate the same traits and in turn be able to pass on their genes when the time comes. S’all good in bowerland.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in bowerland. In fact, we live at a very interesting time when one’s biological sex no longer applies to two hermetically sealed categories of human existence. In many ways, it’s liberating and exciting to not inherit a rulebook for human sexual conduct at birth. In other ways, it can be horrifically frustrating as often times games without rules can and often do lead to complete player paralysis. Back when the rules were clear and gender norms brutally policed, women sorta had to consider the guy with the best prospects. I mean, the “best guy” was objectively known by a certain social calculus factoring in his family connections, his wealth, his career potential, his education and sometimes even his looks, but personality definitely not. The question “How do I get that girl to like me?”just didn’t exist.

So maybe one of the most confusing things to have come out of a gender equalizing revolution is just this question. How do I get that girl to like me? Now this is a topic I could probably spend days on and if I weren’t already spending my spring break mostly playing a ludicrous amount of Final Fantasy XIII (I'm on disk three already!), I might have time to go down that path, but for now, I’m going to limit today’s lesson to how to write an attention-getting online dating profile. Your online bower, if you will.

How I Met Your Mother ran an episode about Ted (the guy who is supposed to meet the mother) searching for her by creating an online dating profile. When Ted told his friends, he added, “Come on, there’s no stigma!” To which his friends bemoaned, “Of course there’s still a stigma, that’s why people say there’s no stigma!” Argh. Well, here’s me admitting that I use online dating, but also admitting that because so many great single guys under the age of 30 think online dating is stigmatized, the online dating pool for me is mostly slim pickings.

This could be the function of two things. First, there could just a dearth of twentysomething single men willing to sign up for online dating. Second, the men who do use online dating suck at writing online profiles.

The first, I can’t do much about. I can say that as a graduate student, I don’t seem to get to meet a whole lot of single men who aren’t other students in my immediate vicinity (and I’ll be perfectly honest, the whole introverted, socially-awkward academic thing dominating Harvard and MIT is really, unfortunately, not my bag—but if it were, oh man!). Anyway, whatever this is, it’s my problem and not wanting to be single forever, I did a seemingly rational thing: I turned to the internets.

I was not impressed.

So, why wasn’t I impressed? I’ll tell you what happens when you “search” for matches on any basic match site as a female. You’ll probably read the profiles of, oh, let’s say 100 guys living in a 25 mile radius of you. You won’t actually read all 100 profiles. What you’ll do is skim pictures, obviously, and see which ones you’re even remotely attracted to. You’ll eliminate ones that look like your little brother. You’ll eliminate the ones wearing gold chains or posing next to their cars. (Ok, I do this. My list of instant turnoffs another time, though.) And you’ll probably whittle down your selection to about 25 guys.

Then, you’ll sit down with a cup of tea and read over the first profile, and the second, and the third. And then you stop. Why do you stop? Because you read three profiles that all said, “I like the outdoors, but I like staying in, too.” Or, “I’m really just a normal guy who likes having fun.” Or, “I value my family and my friends.” Or something utterly banal like “I enjoy laughing” (for fuck’s sake, who doesn’t enjoy laughing?). And you’ll read this over. And over. And over.

So let me explain to you what’s wrong with this kind of writing the way I explain this to my students. I sometimes work on the side as a college admissions consultant. I read and edit personal statements, these documents seventeen-year-olds use to tell a stranger halfway across the country something appealing about themselves. There’s not a real trick to these things so much as really using 500 words to make yourself look as unique and interesting as possible. In my opinion, I consider the essay the biggest “gimme” of the process as it’s the only thing you can have any input on by your senior year of high school. Your academic record is set. Your SATs are done. Your letters of recommendation are completely out of your hands. And all they want out of these 500 words is a snapshot that humanizes you and makes you more than a list of numbers. That’s not that hard, really? Is it?

Now, no matter how hard I try to convey this to kids, I will still inevitably get an essay filled to the brim with platitudes and clichés. I quickly dispatch these with red pen and the words, “NO! NO! GOD NO!” scrawled in the margins. And then I remind myself that these are paying clients. I usually replace where I wrote, “NO! NO! GOD NO!,” with “Show, don’t tell.” What do I mean by that? Don’t tell me it felt spectacular to shoot the game-winning shot. That’s boring and when you say it out loud, even sounds kind of stupid. Describe for me the noise in the crowd, the sweat on your d’s face, your coach’s yelling at you, “SHOOT! SHOOT!” That’s the shit I want to read. So show me, don’t tell me. I want to be there, so take me there. Sometimes, this is all it takes for me to get back beautiful, tiny little essays that make me say, “Damn, kid, now even I want to get to know you.” And that’s exactly what you want an admissions counselor to say.

So back to online profiles. I think a lot of the general rules of college admissions apply. But unlike college admissions, the agency of selection is theoretically “two-way.” A woman can just as easily as a man contact a potential match. The problem is they don’t. Well, not entirely true. The problem is the ones they bother to contact are all the same guy. I’d imagine if you gave me Match.com’s data for any geographic radius, I could tell you exactly which handful of guys are getting virtually 80% of the female-initiated messages. But seeing as I don’t and won’t get my hands on this data, you’re just going to have to take my informed guess as good enough.

The men who get these messages may be pretty good looking, but the one thing they will all invariably have is a fantastic profile. But just as with admissions essays, they won’t be identical. These dudes understand that the goal in writing a profile is to distinguish themselves from every other male on the site. To build the prettiest, shiniest bower.

On every online dating service, there are more straight men than there are straight women. And for every message a man gets from a woman, she’s probably getting ten. That’s just the odds. And yet, so many persist on filling their profiles with platitudes and clichés, as if “I value my friends and my family” really tells me anything about you (well I guess I could assume from this that maybe you’re not a hermit living in a cave without any social contact whatsoever, but that’s a really low bar, honestly). If I had to edit men’s online profiles the way I edit college essays, it’d be a nightmare. If we were bowerbirds, these guys would be decorating their nests with dung and broken nutshells thinking they’ve gone and built the Taj Mahal.

So I’m going to try to list five of the biggest offenses I see and how you can correct them.

1) Show, don’t tell. Like I said, this is the biggest, most important thing I can tell anyone ever presented with an opportunity to sell yourself. Every time you write a sentence you think describes you, ask yourself, “Am I telling someone what I am, or am I showing them?” I can guarantee you will come across infinitely more interesting if you actually take a moment to describe something you love with a bit of detail rather than say, “I like hiking.”

2) Don’t leave blanks and don’t be lazy! Needless to say, the most dreaded thing I hate reading is the line: “I hate describing myself.” Ok, well, suck it up soldier! Sorry, this whole finding the love of your life thing is so much effort! Gosh! No, really, really, think about how this is read on the other end. Why would a self-respecting woman want to date a guy who can’t even put in the effort to fill out a paragraph or two on an online dating profile? It can only really be read negatively; either you’re lazy or you’ve really nothing interesting to say about yourself. It’s not going to be read as “Oh, he’s so modest!” the way I think guys think it will be.

Honestly, sometimes I wish guys put as much work into finding a girl as they do getting into college. Those seventeen year old boys I work with, on top of regular school commitments, put hours into studying for their SATs, captaining varsity sports teams and volunteering at food banks. The sheer effort that goes into an producing a seventeen-year-old college applicant is unmatched by any effort I ever see the average college-educated guy put into dating. Aside from the "They just want to get laid at this age" argument, I don't know why so many twentysomething men who actually want girlfriends are so cavalier about this dating thing. Another time, though. Back to my original train of thought.

3) Don’t describe what you want. Look, everyone’s on a dating site for a reason, but the “About me” section of your profile is not to be misread as the time to talk about what you want in a girl. I know what I’m like already, but I don’t have a single reason why I should want to be with you. More problematically, though you may think listing your desired attributes in the opposite sex wouldn’t reflect badly on yourself, you’re dead wrong. How can that be, you ask? Well, consider the following a “teaching moment” in female thinking:

First, don’t be an idiot and write something anywhere approaching the orbit of “no fatties!” Yes, I get it, you’re trying to be funny. Haha. But in all seriousness (no it’s still not funny), I have a guy friend who in his profile had for months basically had something that sounded like, “I want a thin, active girl.” Which is fine, right, to think you want that but the first problem is most girls—no matter *how* thin they objectively are—do not think of themselves as thin and thus will think you won’t want them, so why bother. And secondly, most girls wouldn’t want to date a guy who advertises how superficial he is. Because I knew the guy pretty well, I knew by “thin and active” he basically meant just anyone who wasn’t noticeably overweight, but he basically alienated like 90% of the female pool with that single sentence. I told him to take that sentence out and since then, he’s been way more successful in getting responses when he contacts girls.

The other peeve I have is when guys say they want a woman who “acts like a lady.” I don’t think many men without little sisters realize this, but the phrase “act like a lady” has always been a way for authority figures to tell little girls to stop doing whatever it is they’re doing (especially things they may enjoy doing but are seen as “masculine,” like cracking jokes or taking up more room while sitting than is “ladylike”). It’s a control thing. To say “I want a woman who acts like a lady” would be interpreted by a woman like me as you saying you want someone to be submissive, malleable and obedient. I’m absolutely sure that’s *exactly* what a lot of guys want but would never say as blatantly as this. But in my world, most of my guyfriends sincerely do want to meet women who are independent, opinionated and yes, even sometimes assertive. I'm not exactly sure if this would be read as a simply another throw-away platitude by other women, but for me, at least, this would be read as a turnoff.

In this way, I think it’s always potentially dangerous to describe what you want in a girl in your profile because the girl of your dreams may interpret your description as something wholly not her. Thus, I think it’s a better idea to not put what you’re looking for in your profile and decide for yourself after contact if she’s a good match for you or not.

4) Offer a neutral hook. One of the things I’ve learned about men is that they’re far, far more likely to approach me in Real Life if I’ve got a “prop.” What’s a prop? Usually, in my case, it’s a book (because it’s a rare moment that I don’t have one on my person) but sometimes it’s something like a brightly colored headband or my college hoodie. My theory behind why these things work is not because they make me more of an alluring person (please…) but that they offer neutral ground. They’re something a guy can innocently ask about without making it verbally obvious that he’s interested in me and thus he preserves his face should I rebuff his advance.

In this way, I suspect a lot of girls would be way more comfortable talking about something that both she and you would have equal footing talking about. That rules out talking about themselves, yourself or your obsession with fantasy water polo. So give some neutral ground. Match sites try to provide this with a list of favorite books or whatever, but you could make it a lot more obvious of a hook if you tried. Maybe a cute little observation about how the subway runs. Maybe a rumination about why you think travel is better in the winter than the summer. Opinions on neutral things here are ok, because opinions on things everyone has. But not everybody shares your enthusiasm for water polo. (And yes, you can actually learn a lot about a person by how they talk about the subway.)

5) Check out the competition. Seriously, look at what guys on the site are writing in their profiles. If your profile looks like theirs, change it. If you’re describing an interest you think makes you unique, but seven other guys in a 10 mile radius all share the same interest, it’s no longer a selling point. In fact, it’s a detriment. I think you’d be shocked at how not a special, unique snowflake you really are when you compare your profile to the 25 other guys living around you. That doesn’t mean you can’t still be exactly who you are and just put a little more effort into presenting yourself more colorfully.

Ok, so that’s five tips. Maybe I’ll make a list of five more another time. But that’s a lot, right? Right? Well, it’s enough for now because you’ve literally just read through what in Word has amounted to literally 10 pages of double-spaced text. Good show.