Your Dating App Profile is Fine
It's the Way You're Managing Your Apps That's Working Against You
Like many single women searching for long-term partners, I had set up carefully-curated Hinge and Bumble profiles, and I had doggedly scrolled and swiped, messaged and liked, all of it adding up to absolutely nothing except lost time and compromised mental health.
I kept thinking, we’ve got to be missing something. This isn’t working, and it’s not just me — it doesn’t seem to be working for anyone. Not only were the dating apps not producing suitable matches, but using them was ruining my life.
I kept falling into a cycle that looked like this; maybe it’s familiar to you:
Decide I want to meet someone and join an app;
Get initially overwhelmed by all the attention, even though 90% of it ranges from terrifying to stupid;
Endure a lot of abuse and aggression from men;
Go out on some terrible dates;
Become obsessed with the app precisely because it’s not providing good matches, which, paradoxically, encourages me to spend more time on it trying to make it work — time looking and swiping and eventually hitting figurative “rock bottom” that is in reality not a bottom at all because of the infinite scroll;
Throw up my hands in frustration, quit the app, and decide to try to be happy on my own;
Decide I’m not truly happy on my own;
Join a different app, and begin the whole hopeless cycle again.
This time around, I decided to get academic about it. I have a Ph. D. in rhetoric and critical discourse analysis, which is a fancy word for “reading between the lines,” and it occurred to me that the research techniques I’ve applied in other projects might be the key to unlocking the dating apps.
I’d played around with this previously and had had some success using a few different techniques to write my own profile and to more accurately read men’s profiles. These tricks were helpful, but they were still hit-or-miss; I still felt too much at the mercy of the app, so I decided to ramp up my methods.
On a whim, I googled “How do you find a needle in a haystack?” The answer, according to people who are clearly way more practical and logical than me, is to burn it. Burn the haystack, and the needle is left lying on the ground since metal doesn’t burn. Duh. It seemed so obvious that I almost just navigated away, until I realized what an elegantly simple solution it offered for online dating. If we could “burn the haystack” of unsuitable, undatable men, then we’d find the needles. There HAD to be needles in there, right?
I knew there were; the question was how to find them. I began my strategizing by reading tons of literature and self-help advice to single women, and what I found is that we are primarily given two pieces of advice:
1. Make yourself as appealing as possible to as many men as possible;
2. Give everyone a chance; it’s really hard to tell from a dating app what someone is actually like in real life.
My personal experience on the apps suggested that both these directives are misguided. For one thing, there’s no shortage of men on dating apps — they outnumber us two-to-one. Trying to appeal to all of them not only clogged up my profile with random “likes” and “hey beautifuls,” but it was emotionally overwhelming and at times felt aggressive. Just looking through all of their profiles was an enormous waste of time (probably a moot point in 2024, but even the most sophisticated of algorithms do a terrible job of determining which two people might connect).
In terms of giving everyone a chance because there’s no way to tell from the apps what someone is like in real life, well: that’s just patently false. There are *highly* effective ways to read men’s profiles and to make accurate conclusions about whether someone would be an acceptable romantic partner if you know what you’re looking for (and, more importantly, what you’re not). I’ve written previously about some specific tools to apply, and using them was helping to some degree, but not enough. I still had this nagging feeling that there was something key I was missing that could really shift things.
The game, I realized, wasn’t nearly as much in personal presentation as it was in app-management. You have to figure out how to use the apps to burn the haystack, and you CAN; it’s doable. If you do it effectively, you’ll be left with a *much* shallower dating pool, but it will be populated by men you might actually like to date.
I started quietly sharing my methods with friends, and then I started writing articles about it, and then other people started writing articles about it. I realized how much of a hunger there was for something exactly like this. It was like there were all these women out there, knowing that what we were doing didn’t work and suspecting it never would, but without a map of any alternative, we all just kept swiping.
So I drew the map. I started a secret Facebook group under the name “Burned Haystack Dating,” and women started following. In less than a year and a half nearly 75,000 women have joined, and that’s with zero promotion. Women started sharing it friend to friend, sister to sister, and mother to daughter.
I teach the details of the method in the Facebook group, and working together now, we are constantly implementing tweaks, sharing successes and failures (and a lot of laughs), and, more importantly, the apps are suddenly working FOR us instead of driving us mad. We’re going out on enjoyable dates with men whose goals are similar to ours (the group and method are specifically tailored to help women find long-term, monogamous matches). The rest of our lives, because they’re no longer controlled by useless algorithms or hijacked by go-nowhere men, are much more enjoyable.
You can join the group here if this is something you’re interested in. It’s turned into a crowd-sourced social experiment in addition to an academic project — we’re burning the haystack together, and just so you know: there really are needles in there. 😊
If you’re a woman or nonbinary person, you can join the Burned Haystack Dating Project on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/9116647515019601
Instagram account for everyone: https://www.instagram.com/word_case_scenario/?hl=en
I had been low-key dating like this since I started, but having the academic research and analysis has been so helpful to put words to what I felt instinctively.
My calling out one of the so-called dating experts you describe is what got me kicked out of a Facebook community that really meant a lot to me that was *supposed* to be feminist.
I'd do it again.
The "expert" told us to Always Be Flirting, and she defined flirting as showing interest whether you had any or not.
Um, yeah. That's called lying, and it's rude, unkind, and potentially dangerous.
She also said she flirted with a man at a bar, who turned out to be married, but he introduced her to a single friend of his, so yay!
The real kicker was she claimed that her clients were happy to go on bad dates because it was good practice.
It bums me out so hard that people are making money off from women who believe their BS (although I have to question how many of them are actually making money...)
It's not you, it's them. You are fine. More than fine, you are amazing!
You know? Your method has been helping me A LOT, not only with dating, but with all my relationships.
I have become a very close observer of peoples words, rhythms and silences.
They all have a meaning!!
What made me a bit upset is to realize that if I had known about you and your work, I would not have dated, probably 95% of the men I've ever dated throughout my life. Maybe I would have found a sweet and loving needle by now!
But, better late than never, and I'm very very grateful for all your efforts. You have transformed my perception of this part of my life, which has so much impact on the rest of it!
I hope you can turn this into a self-sustaining project so you can keep helping many many people around the world!! Thank you so much Jennie ❤️️❤️️❤️️