Swipe, match, chat, date.

That’s how dating apps are supposed to work.

Damn straight that hasn’t been my experience though, and I’d hazard a guess it hasn’t been yours either. More like freak out trying to create a decent profile, swipe incessantly for a few weeks, nearly have a heart attack when you actually get a match, sweat over how to start the chat and then die of shock when you get a reply. Rinse and repeat.

Creating a decent profile was one of the hardest parts of the whole process, tbh. Even harder than solving Wordle in one round. Not that I’ve ever achieved that level of elite-ness.

It seems the things that make us date-able are no longer our shining personalities, our caring natures or our ability to make each other laugh til we cry, but rather our level of skill in taking selfies and creating slick bios.

Having god-level selfie skills and being a great person are in no way mutually exclusive, but neither does being crap at presenting yourself well on dating apps make you un-dateworthy. Often it’s quite the opposite, you’re extremely dateable, you just have a junk profile.

I claim to be somewhat of an expert in this area, having gone through a period of intentionally only dating dudes with really poor quality profiles. If you want to read about that little adventure in more detail it's here, but I did it because I wanted to see the real person behind the blurry photos, the typos and bad grammar or the game of ‘which one in the group photo are you’. And boy, was I glad I did because I learned a very valuable lesson.

If you’re just in it for the numbers and you want to get more matches, you need a super slick profile. But if you want to get better quality DATES I’d suggest opening your mind a little bit wider and swiping yes to the profiles that are less than perfect. I guarantee you there’s a stash of hidden gems just waiting to be discovered.

To those of you who are the hidden gems, who have skills in other areas outside the online realm, I see you. The team at Bumble have some good advice for creating a good profile https://bumble.com/en/the-buzz/bumble-profile-promptsbut if it’s heading for the too-hard basket and you’d rather delegate the task to someone else, download the Swipemate app and we’ll sort you out with a brand spanking new custom profile so good you’ll be like damnnn.. who ‘dis?

Yours in solidarity,

Dr Judy
(not a real Doctor, obvs)