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Love Language & Left Swipes

Love is in the air, dangerously cold weather warnings are wracking the east coast, and every restaurant is booked wall to wall for Sunday night—it must be that time of year again. No, we don’t mean Lincoln’s birthday. It’s Valentine’s Day—perhaps the most binary holiday of the year. All the happily paired off couples traipse gleefully to their romantic dinners-for-two, while the rest of us hunker down indoors to weather the storm of sentimentality.

These days, more and more people who are hoping to break out of the second camp and into the first are turning to online dating apps in search of a soulmate. But as these folks know, there are few more high-pressure activities than trying to craft a dating profile. You’ve got one shot to make a good first impression, and sometimes only a few seconds to make it. In a situation like this, every decision you make about how to present yourself matters.

At maslansky + partners, we’re firm believers that it all comes down to language. You can have everything else right—the right selfie angle, the right Instagram filter, the right interests—but if you can’t bring it all together with the right words and language, people still might pass you by.

So we conducted a series of focus groups with real life New Yorkers to find out exactly what kind of language they would like to see in a potential match’s online profile. Drawing on that research, we’re here to share four simple language tips we found that can help you put your best virtual foot forward.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

To learn more about the research that led to these findings, visit thelanguageofonlinedating.com.