Nobody Writes a Good Profile

Writing about yourself for the purposes of romantic availability is one of the quieter humiliations available to adults. You sit down to produce a text that is simultaneously honest, compelling, and flattering, and you immediately discover that those three requirements are incompatible. The honest version is too boring or too damaged. The compelling version is a character you’d struggle to maintain past the second drink. The flattering version is a lie with decorative elements.

The personals section this journal ran for a while worked better than I expected. People met. Not always in the dramatic, capital-L sense—sometimes just a drink, an evening, a story worth telling later. The format helped: structured questions, a little multiple-choice absurdity, something to push against rather than a blank page demanding improvised sincerity. The blank page defeats nearly everyone. A template at least gives you somewhere to start lying from.

What I remember most is the decision moment—whether to actually submit something, to stake a small, legible claim on being findable. Most people circled it for weeks without committing, which is precisely how they approached the underlying desire as well.

The internet has better mechanisms now, supposedly. Algorithms match on behavioral data you didn’t consciously provide. Swipe interfaces replaced the earnest paragraph. It’s faster and more efficient in aggregate, but the self-description problem hasn’t been solved—just deferred, redistributed into photo selection and 150-character bio compression and the performance of effortless desirability. The blank page is still there. It’s just smaller.