Guest Post by Gary Morgenstein
Online dating is like shopping through a catalog with the easy option to return the package. In many ways, it’s all so easy. Post a picture. Write a profile.
Send a message. All from the comfort of home. Yet there are pitfalls and rules.
1. It’s a numbers game, the romantic equivalent of Operation Shock and Awe
2. You must sign up for as many sites as you can afford/have time for
3. Never get discouraged -- odds are astronomical against you
4. Don’t check dating site messages at work -- unemployment reduces your attractiveness
Today, I’m offering tips for guys on their online photos. Yes, we all need witty profiles and a sea of fascinating interests, but the first thing a woman does is look at your picture. If they say yuck, you’re toast, guys.
These are bad ideas for profile photos.
1. You waking in the morning with a sinus infection
2. Coming out of anesthesia
3. Going under anesthesia
4. Handcuffed, officially or unofficially
5. Tight jeans
6. Screaming at your kids
7. Hoisting brews with your buds dressed like a Viking
8. Spray-painted in your favorite football team’s colors
9. Showing ANY private parts or parts contiguous to private parts
10. Wheeling your mother raises questions whether you’re a Momma’s Boy
11. Jokingly kissing another man creates suspicions you don’t need
12. Kissing another woman underscores all their doubts about a man’s fidelity
13. Never frowning -- women don’t want a sourpuss
As with everything else, women look at our pictures differently. While the instant repulsive factor certainly works as much for them as us, they’re already calculating emotional possibilities based primarily on your picture.
1. Will you be fun?
2. Will you beat them with a strap?
3. Can you be trusted with a joint checking account?
And on and on, like the computers which guide probes to Jupiter. You can try and deceive them, but they’re way ahead of you at every turn.
Photo Tips
You can’t show up for a date and lay a cardboard cutout on the chair while you hide by the bar, answering remotely. You must be there in the flesh, boys.
That means if you have a receding hairline or none at all, don’t show the picture of you in the old ‘fro. If you have gray hair, that shot of you with black locks won’t cut it. And taking a picture of yourself on your tippy toes is dumb. If you’re short, you’re short. Get over it.
- Not too close, which might show old acne scars
- Show off your best features: smile, hair, clothing, the Maserati, two-level home, boat, beautiful dog, expensive furniture, anything suggesting you’re worth a conversation
- Post a casually dressed photo and one of you in a suit so she can imagine you on a Saturday night as well as leaving her apartment in the morning heading for work
Remember the woman will rarely look exactly like her picture. Then again, neither will you. If you within the 80% range, you have taken a very important first step.
Novelist/playwright Gary Morgenstein’s How to Find a Woman…Or Not is a comic how-to guide to love,
romance and sex, viewing Planet Earth as one potential singles bar, from gyms, mass transit, grocery stores and doctors’ offices to online dating. Morgenstein is the author of four novels: Loving Rabbi Thalia Kleinman, a romantic triangle about a divorced man who falls for a woman rabbi; Jesse’s Girl, the heart-pounding story of a widowed father’s search for his adopted teenage son; the political thriller Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and the baseball Rocky The Man Who Wanted to Play Center Field for the New York Yankees.
His prophetic play Ponzi Man performed to sell-out crowds at a recent New York Fringe Festival. More about Gary.