The Problem with Modern Romance Is Too Much Choice

TL;DR - Put some real effort and time into optimizing your dating profile.

I think it is how it is written. I met my wife on Match.com 16 years ago, back in the dinosaur age of internet dating. If you look around on these sites, they often have a 2000 character (or similar) limit on the text you can put in the profile, and most ads do not even use 10% of that. "I'm not good at these forms, just ask me anything!" or some useless drivel that does not tell me about the person.

My profiles had the most success when I used all the character count, and I spent a fair amount of time editing in Word. Since you get one shot to make a first impression, why not make the best possible? I try to get someone who knows me well to read it, and to check to make sure the tone is correct. Who wants to date someone who comes across as angry or bitter?

If I put that much effort into the wording, I would always get a ton of top level choices. The women wrote me, I didn't have to chase them. I think the differentiator was that they could clearly get a sense of my personality (what I thought was funny, etc) from reading the max length profile, and it stood apart from the 100 character competition. At the end of the day, it is a sales job like any other - put on your best presentation, clearly explain your deal breakers in a positive way, and be better prepared than the next guy.

Because all you have to do is be more appealing than the competition. If the other guy is more attractive, but seems boring, then you will probably beat him if your profile is amusing. Intelligent women get tired of pretty but stupid guys, they usually want someone with more substance. If you can communicate that in your ad before the first date, then you are several steps ahead.

I have an outside sales background; once I put dating in the context of selling it became something I was quite good at. I was just selling myself after all.

Being an Asian does not imply unattractiveness. It's one's other properties that determine attractiveness (muscular body, etc).

Considering Asian as a property of unattractiveness is racist. Even if you are an Asian yourself.

I think the point is less about how they are surrounded by people who want to date them and more about the fact that should they chose to, they have the option of any of accepting a date, or even asking for one themselves, from the typically plentiful group of single people who are seeking their attentions.

Ignoring these opportunities in favour of having a computer mediated interaction where they are able to choose precisely what they are interested in... does fit the definition of "picky". Most people probably have their own personal reasons for it, but that doesn't make it less of a fit for the dictionary definition of picky.

Because you eliminate entire groups of people without considering other attributes - if you met someone and only learned their religion some time later, you might find its not as important to you as you thought. If you rule it out before you can make that discovery , you never know what kind of people you have closed the door on.

Of course I'm someone who married the person who couldn't be more different in politics, personality and background - 17 years ago and going strong. So naturally my perspective here is biased - on the basis of criteria I thought were important to me at that age, I have no doubt I never would have considered her if I saw her profile and went by he facts and figures.

When I last used online dating (4+ years ago), I saw a decent number of height requirements stated explicitly from female profiles.

I always found this interesting, not because of the idea itself, but because they chose specific heights as cutoffs. It was particularly common to see women pick 6' as their cutoff. Many of these women were significantly shorter than 6', even if they wore heels.

If you're 5'4" (say), can you really tell the difference between 5'10" and 6'? Are those two inches actually a dealbreaker? Walking past men on the street, can you actually filter out all men under 6' accurately and precisely? It seems extremely unlikely that anyone could do that unless they were quite close to 6' themselves.

And yet it's trivial to filter out every guy under 6' on a site like OkCupid. The site provides built-in functionality to do so. I'm willing to bet a significant percentage of women stating they require a height of 6' or higher would often be willing in real life to date men much shorter than that, because they probably don't even know what 6' precisely looks like.

It's also been convincingly demonstrated that men on dating sites inflate their height by 2 full inches on average. Suppose you don't really know what 6' precisely looks like and go on a date with a 5'10" guy claiming to be 6'. You may not realize he's not actually 6' and believe the claim from his profile. From here on out, your idea of dating "6'" men becomes reinforced based on faulty data.