The smoking area of the club is where dating app profiles get put on trial. Photos are analysed, stats are scrutinised, and when it comes to prompts, everyone agrees on one thing—nobody is original. This year, I really want to: travel more. My simple pleasures: gym. Typical Sunday: roast dinner and pub.
Prompts are supposed to encourage users to consider personality as well as appearance—with Hinge marketed as an alternative to swipe-first competitors like Tinder. But if everyone chooses the same prompts and gives the same responses, the feature becomes redundant. We mock the lack of originality, yet continue to copy it, choosing familiarity over risk. The question is not why dating apps are boring, it’s why we are so afraid to be ourselves on them.
The flaw with creating a dating app profile is that you know you have an audience, and that audience isn’t just potential matches. Everyone’s favourite game is picking apart a friend’s Hinge feed, and it’s hard to ignore that we are advertising ourselves to a much wider—and much more ruthless—audience than anticipated.
So, why be authentic and vulnerable when you can fit in? After all, the bog-standard prompts still have their merits. If your aspiration is to travel, it hints you have disposable income. If your simple pleasure is the gym, it signals you live a healthy lifestyle. If your Sunday activity is going to the pub, it shows you’re not a complete loner. These qualities are definitely attractive, but are any of them unique? Is anyone bothering to read between the lines anyway?
Perhaps then, the recipe for a good dating app prompt is individuality and words from somewhere other than the Hinge English Dictionary. The goal should be to invite response, not applause. A prompt which says something controversial is better than a prompt which says nothing at all, and who doesn’t love a friendly argument over Hinge? Truly embrace living the enemies to lovers arc.
I am not here to tell you what to put in your profile though—I am not Buzzfeed, and this article is not titled ‘Top 10 Dating App Prompts That Actually Work (Number 7 Will Shock You).’ But that’s my point; we need to start thinking about ourselves before others, considering how well our profiles reflect us before considering how they will be received by others.
That is easier said than done though. In the age of social media, superficiality is hardwired into us, along with the insecurities that come as a result. Being rejected on a dating app is a lot easier when your profile isn’t really you, but a version of you conforming to a template.
The templates are safe. They’re legible, inoffensive and familiar. They make you easy to place, but also impossible to remember. So maybe the question isn’t what makes a good dating app prompt, but what makes a memorable one. If your prompts disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? Wanting to travel more this year isn’t boring, but putting it on your Hinge profile is.
Image by Helloimnik on Unsplash