On the evolution of my dating app bio

My online dating journey started last September and there are some funny stories as well as some awkward ones. Together they allowed me to learn who I am and explore what I look for in life. Even though sometimes I want to cover my face and bury some of the awkward stories deep, I appreciate they did happen. At the very least, they gave me more jokes to tell.

My first attempt

A bit of loneliness and boredom of my routine life drove me to get on the app, but I had no idea what I was doing and what I was looking for except I wanted to connect with people. I can’t remember exactly what I put down for my bio but it roughly sounds like this:

“Hi I’m May, I’m a software engineer. I like cycling, bushwalks or just reading in a park. Also into nature & science documentaries and finance podcasts.”

Super boring. Along with that, I also felt very intimidated by the “cool kids”, those people who have travelled to 100+ countries with numerous stories to tell, or those who have the glamorous pictures with friends at music festivals and nightclubs. I was a nerd and all my profile pictures were taken by my mum. I didn’t like that. And it didn’t help when I started chatting with people, somehow the first two people I talked to both asked me the same question — what’s the craziest thing I have ever done, I felt like they were expecting answers like escaping from a serial killer on a hitch-hiking trip in Europe, or accepting drugs from a stranger at a bar and then making out with them in the bathroom, I had none of those to offer. Now I know that I don’t have to make impulsive and irresponsible decisions to be cool, but I didn’t then and I wanted to be cool just to fit in, which led me down to a fun road.

So for a while, I was super open for suggestions. I went on a date with a girl, had too many drinks, and said yes when she asked if I wanted to go back to hers and smoke weed. The next moment we were at her place smoking weed. Then I smoked too much and got really paranoid. As we were making out, only part of me was engaged in the moment, part of my brain couldn’t stop picturing that she’s going to murder me while the rest of brain still has some rationality left was trying to calm myself down and tell myself none of our interactions suggested she wanted to kill me. Afterwards, she offered to walk me to the train station, I said okay thank you and then fell asleep. Then I woke up at 4 am feeling awful, sneaked out of the house, and got on a train home.

Another time, I was talking to a backpacker and she invited me to join her on a trip for a weekend so I flew over to Queensland from Sydney. It wasn’t all so crazy except I had never met her in person until I was there, but nothing bad happened and we hiked, went to beaches, had wine and cheese in our room after that, made out, etc. The funny part came on the next morning when she had already left to catch her transport so I had to check out at the hotel she booked. I handed over the room card and the receptionist asked “your last name?”, I was like “What…uh…I don’t know…”

The thing is, it didn’t make me feel any cooler after those dates. It confused me even more on what cool is, I didn’t understand why having fun almost always involves drinking and talking about other fun times that involve drinking. I still don’t, but at least now I don’t try to fit my story in the narrative anymore. Also making out with strangers is awkward, please let me know if you have a different experience, I would love to learn from you.

I appreciate that those cool people took me in, but I only found out I’m not cool and I don’t want to be cool. I wish I knew that from the beginning. But I guess that’s not how it works, I probably wouldn’t believe myself without the experience. After all, I didn’t believe I was cool is how all this started.

Then I decided to do it in a tech way

After failing to be cool, more precisely, to enjoy what’s considered cool, I was set out to find another solution. So I fell back into my way of problem-solving as an engineer and that wasn’t the problem, the problem was I had no idea what problem to solve. Somehow, I decided I need a better profile. Looking back, I want to shout at myself: YOU’RE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM.

With the wrong objective that I need a better profile, I again set a wrong key result — the number of likes I get from the apps.

Looking at my profile, I decided to focus on my bio section. First of all, I wanted to find out if bio does matter or not. I changed my bio to

“Hi I’m May, I’m a software engineer who likes cosmology documentaries and finance podcasts.”

I kept it for two days and as I expected, I didn’t receive any likes. So I knew, people do read bios and it does make a difference. (Note: the data from now on is all retrieved from my memory, the bio is definitely not the only factor that could cause the result, and it could also be very skewed by my brain that wants to tell a good story.)

In the meanwhile, I started reading through people’s bios and trying to find the essence of a good bio. After a few hundred bios, I had my answer. A good bio has an action point, so you know how to start a conversation with the person after reading it. A good bio makes it clear what the person wants. And a really good bio is funny.

Following the findings, I updated my bio to

“Hi I’m May, I like cycling, bushwalking and got into rock climbing recently. I’m a software engineer and sometimes I hope people throw error messages when I do something wrong. Looking for someone to share the leftover sandwiches I brought home from work with.”

Because I wasn’t sure what I was looking for at that time, I might have tried a little too hard on being funny. The bio seemed working, I started to get more likes than before.

What does the number of likes mean? Do I become more popular? It doesn’t feel like so. But this process did make me start to ask the question — what do I want.

At the end of the day, maybe I wasn’t solving the wrong problem. Without asking the question “how can I build a better profile”, I couldn’t figure out the actual question is “what do I want”.

As I was meeting more people, it came more clear to me what I really want and what I definitely don’t want. I want to do the stuff I like doing with people, like climbing or hiking. I don’t really want to meet a stranger at a noisy and crowded pub after 8 pm. I prefer meeting people in person than texting, physical presence gives a lot of context in a conversation. I’m open to the idea of hookup but I’m still trying to figure out the terms and conditions that I can enjoy.

Finally, I settled on

“Hi I’m May, I like cycling, rock climbing (always looking for a climbing partner at st peters) and everything outdoors really. I’ve tried mindless hookups and it doesn’t seem to be working for me, mindful hookup is okay though. Let’s chat a little bit and meet up at a park or for a walk.”

Coming back to people

While I was fixated on building a better profile, I continued to meet people. In my head, I imagined it would be as simple as this — we chat for a little while and schedule a date, then we would meet up and either move on or keep going depending on how the date goes. But it was a little more complicated in execution.

Firstly I learned there are more passive people than active ones. I could have those matches sitting in the app but few would actually talk to me. A lot of the time, I found myself having to start the conversation, ask people out for dates, follow up on the plan and then remind them before the date, or nothing happens. At first, I thought it was unfair, why do I have to do all the dirty work? But over time I take it less and less personally. In some ways, it’s like running a startup, draft up cold emails to potential customers, try to set up a demo, and then follow up with a proposal, etc. It is not shiny work but something has to be done to sell, in this case, me.

After that, a more painful lesson I learned is that people will say yes just because I asked or for whatever reason, but that doesn’t mean they will do it, again the same as in startup world — people will say they like your idea but it doesn’t mean they will buy your product. When the first person apologised and told me she couldn’t come to our date because the circumstances had changed and she wasn’t in a place of dating, I was a little disappointed but I thought it was understandable. The second person bailed on me, I started to ask myself “What did I do wrong?”. Then it happened again, the question became “What’s wrong with me???”. In the two months, 5 out of 8 dates that I made got cancelled, and the most spectacular one was from someone who cancelled one hour before the date and the reason was she was too worried about climate change and had to sit tight at home.

That lowered my self-esteem for a while. Then I realised that there is nothing wrong with me, how could they possibly know I was wrong when they hadn’t even met me yet? But I did do something wrong, I could have made it more clear in my profile and messaging that my intention is to meet up than endless messages. I could have been tougher on my principles when someone bailed without a sound reason, I should just move on instead of letting them reschedule again, and again. Now I know that. Now I also keep in mind that only 37.5% of the people who agree to go on a date with me will actually show up, so I keep my expectation low before I actually meet a real person and I appreciate it more when people do show up for me.

But it’s easier said than done. Even after I made a rule for myself that I will minimise the texting online, meet up as soon as possible and talk in person, I still fell for it. There was always a voice in my head saying “maybe it is an exception this time”, but there was never an exception. Not talking in person only complicates things up.

My mistake is to trust my intuitions in a low validity environment. According to Daniel Kahneman in Think, Fast and Slow(Section 21. Intuition vs. Formulas), intuition works well in high validity environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable and when one has learned the regularities through prolonged practice. Neither dating is a predictable situation nor am I an expert in dating. In this case, even though it might sound unauthentic, it is more effective to decide a strategy in advance and stick with it. After all my highs and lows, here is my strategy

• I want to meet people and talk in person than messaging on a screen
• I want to be transparent and clear with my feelings

It this my final answer? Nearly. There are always complications where the strategy can’t apply or conflict with each other, especially in this post-pandemic world where meeting in person is not always possible or safe. What if I want to tell someone my feelings in person but it’s not feasible to do so, what do I do? I don’t know.

It’s not all failed stories

I have heavily focused on my failures and learning in this article but there are also dates that went well. The weekend trip was fun and a nice getaway from my routine life, I would like to do it again if opportunities come up. Someone introduced me to rock climbing and we have been climbing partners ever since. Someone showed me how fun gardening is and became my remote gardening coach all this quarantine time, I can eat my own bok choi and lettuce now from time to time thanks to her. As well as the random facts I learned from people otherwise I wouldn’t have known, like Fiji has a large Indian population, etc.

What I’ve learned

Does bio matter?

Dating is not a numbers game, qualitative data means more than quantitative data. If I have to put it in the OKR model again, the objective would be to build real connections with people and the key result should be if I have fun on dates and how happy I am afterwards. From there, I can start to understand what fun is for me and what makes me happy. And then the function of a bio is to reflect who I am and what I want so like-minded people can see me and come around. In that sense, bio matters. But if we are talking about engineering a bio to boost the number of likes, it doesn’t.

My 2 cents on a good bio

Clear about what you want — “What do you want” is the central question you need to answer, firstly to yourself and then you can make it clear to other people.

Call to action — Some sort of prompt for response in your bio helps others to start a conversation with you. It could be a straight forward question or some of your interests or hobbies.

Funny — there is no standard for this, but I always appreciate a good joke.

Note: I spent some time swiping through people’s profiles to get back to the dating mindset when writing this article, I want to say this is not a pleasant experience, I never feel more judged than when I judge people.

Intuitions can be really wrong

I have built up my strategy through my journey, but too easily I would make exceptions, like starting another long and confusing text chain thinking things can be different this time or making another date with someone who didn’t even show up on the first two. So far none of the exceptions I made has worked out nicely, so I think it is safe to say my intuition sucks and it’s for the best to stick with my strategy and boundary.

My definition of having fun now (potential date ideas)

• Doing something I already enjoy doing with someone, e.g. hiking, climbing, gardening, fixing bikes and writing code, etc.
• Trying out new things even though I might find out later I hate them.
• Having hotpot at home. I’m happy to make it halal, vegan or accommodate any dietary preference. But sitting around a steaming hotpot at home in cold winter with the people you like is no doubt the best thing in the world.
• I still fantasise about how making out with strangers could be fun, and I’m open to exploring that.

On the topic of race and stereotypes

I found people online are more direct on race than people that I meet in real life. Once a white girl asked me if I have ever had sex with a white girl like it’s an achievement and told me proudly she has had sex with an Asian girl. Another time an Asian girl drew the conclusion I only like white people because the recent two dates I went on were with someone white. Another person asked if I worked at a Chinese restaurant and if I could make her dumplings after I told her I’m from China.

At first, I got defensive with those questions because I don’t like being achievement and I don’t like being accused of worshipping white people, I don’t like feeling less qualified Chinese. But now I’m more glad those conversations come up than hidden in the back of their head because at least it gives me a chance to explain. Who knows how many people in my real life secretly assume I can make dumplings because I’m Chinese, but in fact, I only make amazing dumplings because I watched a youtube video on how to wrap dumplings in 7 ways.

I also have my share of stereotypes. From the three Hongkong people that I know of, I thought every Hongkong person has a decent job and owns a house. I thought white people like kombucha without basis (if any, I only learned about kombucha when I came to Australia and I never quite understood its taste). Our brain is wired to find patterns and that’s essential for our survival in some circumstances. But what I have learned better is to deconstruct the stereotypes by asking people questions and listening to their stories. And I try to put myself in other people’s shoes and be patient with my answers.

Unlike the two TED talks below offering us a clear strategy with their own happy ended stories (they are really funny, you should check them out if you’ve read this far on the topic), I don’t have an answer and let alone a successful story to support it. But I’m glad I have those experience, those people I meet pull me out of my bubble a little at a time and help me see other people’s unique experience and perspectives. This is my online dating journey, I hope you enjoy reading my story and maybe there’s a thing or two you can relate to.

• Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating
• Christina Wallace: How to stop swiping and find your person on dating apps