Open the dating profile you’ve been working on — or the one you wrote five years ago and haven’t touched since — and read it once, carefully.
How much of it is about who you are? Your hobbies, your favourite places, the music, the dog, your kids, the travel stories, the career.
Now ask: how much of it is about who they are — the person you’re hoping to attract?
If your profile is like most, the answer is almost none of it. And according to research out of UC Berkeley, that’s exactly what’s making it work less well than it could.
What the research found
Juliana Schroeder at Berkeley Haas and Ayelet Fishbach at the University of Chicago analyzed hundreds of profiles on Match and Coffee Meets Bagel, then ran experiments to test what readers actually respond to.
The pattern was stark. More than half of profile writers signalled they wanted to be known by a partner. Only about one in five signalled they wanted to know the other person.
Most of us, in other words, are writing a profile that says: here is who I am, please see me. Very few are writing one that says: I want to know who you are, and I’m someone who will care about it.
Then they tested which actually appealed more. It wasn’t close. The profiles that led with curiosity about the other person consistently beat the ones that led with the writer’s own qualities.
The feeling-known effect
Here’s why. Across study after study, the thing that makes people most satisfied in a relationship — romantic, family, friendship, even at work — isn’t how well they know the other person. It’s how well they feel the other person knows them.
Schroeder gives one example that I haven’t been able to shake. You run into an acquaintance at a party. In one version, you forget their name. In the other, they forget yours.
If you forget their name, it’s not great. But if they forget yours — the relationship is over.
That asymmetry is everywhere. We feel a little bad about not knowing other people. We feel deeply hurt about not being known ourselves.
So the most attractive thing you can signal isn’t here’s how interesting I am. It’s I’m someone who will take the time to actually know you.
Why almost everyone misses it
There’s a reason this isn’t obvious. We each walk around feeling like we contain multitudes — layers a stranger couldn’t possibly catch at a glance. Yet we tend to feel we’ve got other people figured out fast. They tell us one thing and we think, okay, I get it. I know you.
So when we sit down to write a profile, the instinct is to communicate our complexity — to make sure the reader really sees us, so we don’t get lumped in with everyone else.
And that’s the trap. The person reading is doing the exact same thing. They’re skimming your list of hobbies wondering if any of it adds up to someone who could understand them. Usually, they decide it doesn’t.
Three moves that actually work
If you’re rewriting your profile this week, you don’t need to throw it out. You need to rebalance it.
Trim yourself down to what’s true. You still need enough for someone to picture you — good photos, the shape of your life, a few real interests. But two or three things written specifically beat a long list of generalities every time.
Add one line about what you’re curious about in them. Not a requirements list (“must love dogs and hikes”), but something like: I want to know what you’re working through right now. A line that shows you’re paying attention to them, not just inviting them to admire you.
Write one sentence that proves you’ll listen. This is the highest-impact line on the whole profile. I ask a lot of questions on a first date because I’m genuinely curious how people got to where they are. Your words. Make it true.
Which matters most for us
This lands especially hard for those of us returning to dating later in life — divorced, widowed, or single after a long pause. By the time you’ve lived a few decades, you have so much to share, and the urge to get all of it onto the profile is strong.
But what the person on the other end is actually hungry for is the signal that someone will finally, really, get to know them. Not impress them. Not tick their boxes. Just know them.
Which is a relief, honestly. You don’t have to be the most dazzling person on the app.
You just have to be the one who’s genuinely interested in the human on the other side.