Profile Part 4 – Tweaking your Online Dating Profile to reflect who you are

You need to know your higher purpose

Women are attracted to men who know themselves, and know where they’re going. This point is perfectly illustrated by David Deida in his self-help classic, “The Way of the Superior Man:”

“She doesn’t really want to be number one… Imagine that a man must go off to war. He hugs his woman goodbye. She is crying. “Please don’t go,” she begs. “You know that I must,” he answers. They look each other deeply in the eyes. “You know that I love you,” he says to her. “Yes. I know And I also know you must go,” she replies, and another gush of tears bursts from her heartbroken face. He turns and walks out the door, to his necessary destiny, as his woman, full of pain and pride, watches him disappear. This exaggeratedly dramatic scene captures a profound energetic principle: Although your woman seems to want to be the most important thing in your life, she actually can trust and love you more if she is not.
A man’s highest purpose is his priority, not his intimacy. Your woman knows this. Deep inside, she really wants it to be this way. The woman in the scene above would actually feel strange if her man suddenly said, “I’ve changed my mind. You are more important to me than the freedom of mankind. You are the most important thing in my life, and I don’t care if my service to humanity is needed elsewhere, so I’m staying here with you.” Even though part of her would feel glad, a deeper part of her would feel deflated, emptied, let down. And yet, as her man leaves the door to accomplish his mission, she cries, wishing he didn’t have to go. But he does have to go. And she knows it. If a woman has become the point of your life, you are lost.”(Deida, David. “The Way of the Superior Man.” Sounds True Inc., 2006: p. 32.)

When you’re describing yourself, you need to paint a portrait of a man who is in touch with his core values and purpose. You need to describe what you are passionate about in a way that stirs an emotional reaction within her. An old cliché often utilized by people asked to describe a movie they just saw, goes something like this: “I laughed. I cried. It was amazing.” In life, most of us prefer the rollercoaster to the merry-go-round. We pay to see dramas because dramas are, well, dramatic. We expect to be led through a canvas painted with a colorful palette of human emotion. Of course you don’t want to go overboard with this film analogy. Think “Romantic, touching comedy”, not “Schindler’s List.”

Don’t be afraid to discuss a personal quirk or flaw. It gives you a human side. Ultimately you must appear somewhat accessible to her, or she won’t even try.
Don’t be a big cocky goof in your profile. Cocky and funny sentences are useful but temper them with sincerity. An easygoing joking persona is comfortable, but temper it with a serious side. People who drift through life joking and shrugging their shoulders at every turn are not attractive.
Most people live dull lives wrought with convention and herd behavior. If you’re different, show her. Be proud that you stand out from the herd in some aspects of your life. Be that guy with the sparkle in your eye who is always excited about something and going somewhere. You can be different without being odd. You can be exciting without being flamboyant. You can be adventurous without being foolhardy.
Energy and spirited mannerisms have been identified as youth indicators. Sick people and old people talk too slow, too softly, too passively, and have little intonation in their sentences. Their words barely wheeze out between breaths. So convey the opposite with your words. Pound on the keyboard and show her a zest for life.

The “Dionysus Effect”

The Dionysus Effect was a term coined by Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller to account for the female sexual preference for men who display creativity. Dionysus was the Greek god of dance, music, intoxication, and seduction. From a Nietzschean perspective, to act “Dionysian” is to display creative-intuitive power, as opposed to critical-rational power.
We are “social primates. And during most of human evolution the great joy in life was sitting around making stories and making jokes with people while eating. (Doogue, Geraldine, “National Breakfast – Consumerism and Evolutionary Fitness featuring guest Geoffrey Miller” ABC Radio National, June 2, 2009) Ultimately, a woman is primarily attracted to your personality. But how do you convey your personality? Well here are five ways that humans have been doing it for thousands of years:

The Art of Conversation
Humor
Dancing
Cooking
Musicianship
Artistic Talent

Because the track record of the above-listed attraction vectors is so solid, if you have a talent for any of these, you should mention it in your first paragraph. Are you a good conversationalist, writer, story teller, poet, jazz instructor, bass player, sculptor, sushi chef, or a comedian? Then tell her about it — and be specific.

Don’t say, “I am an artist.” Instead say, “I’m an artist and I have a passion for pastels.”
Don’t say, “I like to dance.” Instead say, “I’m an avid Jazz dancer, and I teach it on Sundays down at Baker Hall.”
Don’t say, “I like to cook.” Instead say, “I cook a mean dish of Spanish Paella.”

Displaying your “Dionysian skill set” can be quite seductive.

Careers and Money

So what do you do?

What is the first question that new acquaintances almost always ask? “So, what do you do?”
Right or wrong, good or bad, in the modern era, we have come to associate a man with his career. In psychology, career titles and yearly income are known as “status indicators.” But beyond that, if you want to crystallize yourself as a real person in her mind, you should, in some fashion, mention your career.
Now let’s face it, at first glance, most jobs sound boring. And women don’t like men who base their sole existence on their personal wealth. So our aim here is usually to simply casually mention what we do and move on. If, on the other hand, you happen to have a job title that is associated with exciting emotions (like a rock star, a fashion photographer, an Olympic athlete, or a scuba instructor) then you’re permitted to dwell in this domain a bit more.

Money

“The evidence that women do use direct clues of male status is overwhelming: American men who marry in a given year earn about one and a half times as much as men of the same age who do not. In a survey of two hundred tribal societies, two scientists confirmed that the handsomeness of a man depends on his skills and prowess rather than on his appearance. Dominance in a man is universally considered attractive by women.”

“For women, [in the online dating world] a man’s income is terribly important. The richer a man is, the more emails he receives.”

Do you have to be rich to get the girl? Most dating websites have a spot where you are supposed to indicate your yearly income. While resource displays seem to play a role in female attraction, it is unfortunate that this seems to be the only attraction vector that anyone ever talks about. Society puts a ridiculous amount of unwarranted pressure on men to work long hours for the purposes of amassing a cache of expensive objects (e.g. the wardrobe, the watch, the car, the house). Now if you want to marry a “trophy wife”, then sure, glue yourself to your cubicle chair, make a million dollars and find your gold digging harridan. But, if you want to find a woman who is:

psychologically healthy
socially calibrated
educated
intelligent
altruistic
and compassionate

then the allure of financial wealth is just not going to do it for her.

“In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, [the beggars] are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for… The pleasures of wealth and greatness…strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil… IT IS THIS DECEPTION WHICH ROUSES AND KEEPS IN CONTINUAL MOTION THE INDUSTRY OF MANKIND. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.” – Adam Smith (1700′s, Scottish economist), The Theory of the Moral Sentiments’.

“If you’re a male in most species you’re stuck. And there’s very little you can do about your mate value. If you’re a little gorilla with little muscles, you’re a genetic dead end – end of story. You might as well curl up and die. For humans there’s hope. With humans, with these behavioral fitness indicators – you know what modern society does is everything possible to distract us from developing those. Consumerist capitalism says invest all your time and energy according to the delusion that economic success is the only thing that attracts women and the only thing that other men respect. Invest everything there. And that’s very much in the interest of certain powers that be. That’s 99% of what guys spend their time and money on – trying indirect routes. If I only go to Med school and then get a big house, a big car, and then maybe women will like me.’ You don’t need all that and your male ancestors didn’t need that. Everything they had was right within them – sense of humor, language, wit. And how much time do we spend developing those – most of us. Most of us are complete amateurs at that compared to the average Cro-Magnon 50,000 years ago. Why? Because they spent their waking hours doing that stuff. Not sitting silently at school, or in their cubicle at work. They spent their time interacting. And if they saw our styles of interacting they would laugh at us and go I can’t believe our great great great grandsons are doing that stuff. You know. We got over that at age 12.’ And so we miss allocate time and energy.” – Geoffrey Miller

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off…You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.” – Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club”

Now having said that, we need to remember that we don’t know which part of our profile will be the Pièce de résistance for any given woman. We also need to remember that she must look for as many indicators of our “fitness” as possible, when reading our profile page. It is not the money itself that makes you attractive. If money was really the key to female attraction, then all you would have to do to get the girl is make a million dollars, staple a cashier’s check to your shirt, walk into a nightclub on a Saturday night, and show it to the first hot girl you see. But is this going to work?

Nope.

Money is just an indicator of what kind of man you are. Women crave intelligence and ambition. And if you’re really intelligent and ambitious, then the money will usually follow anyway. At some level, women are aware of this.
Now in the real world of face-to-face human interaction, your career and income doesn’t matter nearly as much as it does online. Why? Because in a nightclub, for example, a woman has the opportunity to very quickly observe your body language, eye contact, vocal tonality, facial expressions, and situational value. It is these five properties that are of primary importance in exciting female attraction. But given the nature of the 2D internet dating profile, a woman’s ability to “read you” is severely limited. Her method for gauging male fitness in the internet domain, is far removed from the techniques her ancestors used on the African Savannah. This is why we should discuss our career to some extent on our profile – simply because we give her more to work with.

“In Buss’s study of thirty-seven societies, women put more value on men’s financial prospects than vice versa. All in all, as Bruce Ellis put it in a recent review, ‘status and economic achievement are highly relevant barometers of male attractiveness, more so than physical attributes.’ What are the clues to status? Ellis suggests that clothes and ornaments provide one set of clues: an Armani suit, a Rolex watch, and a BMW are as blatantly revealing of rank as any admiral’s sleeve stripes or Sioux chief’s headdress.”(Ridley, Matt. “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.” Penguin Books Ltd., 1993: p. 297.)

The general tone we want to convey is something like one of the following:

“Yeah, I’ve got money, and it’s no big deal.”
“Yeah, I’m going to have money one day, and it’s no big deal.”

Let us consider three scenarios:

You currently have money and a prestigious job (like a doctor or a lawyer). In this scenario, simply mention it and move on. Men who perform obnoxious status displays, and who go on and on about their careers, are universally unattractive. If you are passionate about your career, then try to convey the emotions it stirs inside of you,not the financial rewards it brings.
You were born into a lot of money. In this scenario, have a little fun with it and call yourself a “spoiled rotten little rich kid.”
You have no money and your job is lame. Don’t panic. As mentioned previously, it is not the money itself that makes you attractive. Money is only the barometer. And, relatively speaking, in the western world, even a bourgeois is rich. So if your job sucks, don’t talk about it. Instead, talk about your future goals to success and your hopes and dreams. She doesn’t want to see your bank account. She wants to see your mental ingenuity and persistence. As Matt Ridley wrote, “In a monogamous society a woman often chooses a mate long before he has had a chance to become a “chief,” and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on his past achievements. Poise, self assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition–these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions. And not coincidentally, these are the things women find attractive.”

Convey awareness of local social venues

Usually, a healthy attractive woman is going to have a fairly elaborate working knowledge of the hippest social venues in her area. You score points with women when you convey an awareness of these places. Let us consider the following profile sentence:

“You can usually find me studying at a coffee shop, or getting the munchies at my favorite sushi restaurant.”

Not a bad sentence. But if our goal is to get a local girlfriend, then why not mention some venues that she might know of. Try this:

“You can usually find me studying at Café Peabodys, or downtown eating sushi at Sushi Rokz.”

Even if she doesn’t know where these places are, using exact names adds some depth to your personality and makes you seem more real. Now don’t be a “name dropper.” If you mention more than two trendy places in your city, than you’re probably going overboard.

Friends and Family

Healthy, social people have a close group of friends and family, and they make a concerted effort to put these people first in their lives. So somewhere in your profile, take a moment to talk about your friends and family. It need only be a passing comment. But include it in some way. Harvard professor of psychology Daniel Girlbert (author of “Stumbling on Happiness”) has noted that the happiest people tend to be the ‘social networkers’ – those who have a diverse group of close friends with whom they actively participate in various activities. (Gilbert, Daniel. “Stumbling on Happiness.” Knopf, 2006.)

Hopes and Dreams

People who get stuff done are attractive. Unattractive people sit on the couch and do nothing with their lives. So talk about one of the following in your profile:

A goal you just accomplished.
A goal you are currently working on.

Preferably, it’s probably beneficial to talk about both.

Novel Genes

This is a controversial one, but if you have a unique ancestral history, I’d write about it. The gears of evolution tend to work best when they have a diverse gene pool to draw from. In theory, some part of a female’s unconscious mind knows this. And supposedly, this is why women so often find foreign tourists attractive.

“The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety. Chimpanzee females sometimes take considerable risks to mate with novel mates from outside their own groups.” – Anthropologist Dr. Meredith Small of Cornell University

Anthropologist Claud Wedekind of the University of Lausanne, gave used male t-shirts to a group of women and asked them to rate the shirts by how pleasant they smelled. A significant number of women preferred the t-shirts worn by men with the greatest degree of immunological difference. From this, we infer that, to some extent, women are genetically programmed to seek out men with immune systems that substantially differ from their own. In theory, if she mates with an immunologically dissimilar man, her children have a higher probability of fighting off whatever superbug comes down the pike in future generations. So, if you can show a bit of novelty in your bloodline, then who knows, maybe you’ll get an extra point on her attraction scale.

Travel

“World travel” has consistently rated highest amongst all of the personal goals someone can achieve. Have you been someplace cool? Then talk about it. But don’t simply compose a list of random foreign city names. Instead, talk about what you did in these cities. Were you in the Peace Corps? Did you study abroad? Did you backpack across Europe? Write about your experience there, not just the fact that you’ve been there.

Encourage some mystery and intrigue

Don’t give away the ending of your story just yet. You should only provide her with a sampling of your lifestyle in your profile. Leave some sentences open to interpretation. There’s a reason why so many of us spend time on meaningless jigsaw puzzles, video games, and solitaire. It’s fun to figure things out. If someone handed you all of the answers to the crossword puzzle, then what would be the fun in working on it?

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