If one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2014 is to finally find love—and if you’re single, it probably is—then there’s a good chance you may soon turn to online dating. According to a Pew Research poll released last October, 59 percent of Internet users think that online dating is a good way to meet people, while 36 percent of Americans who are single and actively looking for a partner, according to dating site Zoosk, are going online to find a match. Now, you may think that having a face like Ryan Gosling and a bank account like Mark Zuckerberg is the best way to attract women online, but the truth is that even those guys would strike out with a crappy online dating profile. Zoosk studied a sample of around 4000 of their subscribers to understand the most effective ways to set up a profile and send messages, and they recently published their findings. We took a look at the data and broke it down into five easy tips to help you finally find your one true love. Or, at the very least, to get a reply from a woman who doesn’t just post photos of her cats.
1. Avoid the selfie!
Yes, selfies have become an ingrained part of our culture, but you should keep them on Instagram where they belong. According to Zoosk’s data, profiles with a selfie as the photo get a negative 8 percent response rate. So have a friend take a good photo of you, preferably outdoors, and make sure it’s a full body shot. Messages increase by a whopping 203 percent with full body photos. If you’re a little self-conscious about your body type, don’t worry about it. For one thing, women tend to be a little bit less shallow than we are in that department, and, for another, the less you blindside a woman with surprises on the first date, the better. Also, make sure it’s just you in the photo. Trying to impress women by snapping a shot of yourself with that supermodel-hot coworker doesn’t work. Nor will a photo of you with a puppy. Posing with animals accounts for a negative 53 percent rate of message replies.
2. Lay it all out on the table
Well, most of it anyway. While men don’t like it when women mention that they are divorced or have kids, turns out women do. The rate of message responses jumps by 52 percent at the mention of divorce or separation. So go ahead and be honest about those kinds of things. Just, you know, keep it within reason. If you have a foot fetish or a hardcore drug habit, maybe save that for date number. never. Also, make sure to keep things positive on your profile. No one wants to date a sad sack, so use words like "creative," "ambitious," or "laugh." Avoid words like "alone" or "desperately lonely."
3. Play it cool
You wouldn’t walk up to a woman at a bar who you’ve never spoken to and immediately ask her out on a date; you’d chat her up for a bit first. Get to know her, let her get to know you. Same thing applies online. Coming on too strong is a big time turn-off for women (although unsurprisingly, not for men. God, we’re easy) with first-time messages that mention "dinner," "drinks," "lunch" eliciting a negative 35 percent response rate. Also, you’re not Frank Sinatra, so steer clear of the demeaning colloquialisms like "baby" or "doll." Turns out women are not great fans of chauvinism, especially from someone they don’t even know.
4. Learn to talk good English
Let’s face it men, women already think we’re a bunch of cavemen, so they don’t need further confirmation in the form of incoherent and misspelled ramblings. Spelling errors or typing "cuz" instead of "because" in your messages will turn them off as fast as telling them you share a bed with your mother. And yes, emoticons count. This is tricky because women have a mastery over emoticons that we will never truly fathom, but misuse one and it could derail your chances. Same goes for text abbreviations. "Lmfao" will get you a giant 193 percent response rate bump, but "rofl" will get you stone cold silence. Basically the thing to do is to use common sense when dipping into emoticon and abbreviation territory. Anything that makes you sound like a fun, charming, intelligent member of society is kosher. Anything that makes you sound like a dimwitted drunkard whose idea of a good time is shooting rats at the local dump is best to be avoided.
5. This isn’t a shopping list
Don’t create a checklist of things you are looking for in a potential mate as if you were judging livestock. No woman is going to read that and think, Hey, I hit 10 of 12 on this list, we’re total soul mates! They want to know about you, not what you are looking for. Also, they’re looking to date a human being, not a blue ribbon county fair marshal. Talk about what you like to do, what your hobbies are, what you read, what you watch on TV, whether you are a foodie or not. Give the poor girl a chance to decide whether she thinks you might get along or not. And besides, you can list what you are looking for in a woman until you are blue in the face, but if the history of romance is anything to go by, 80 percent of that won’t matter when you meet the right person anyway.
Check out GQ’s Guide to Online Dating here.