Creating a profile forces you to define who you are, and how you want people to see you. We project our ideal selves, who we strive to be, the ‘on a good’ day image.  Then you meet people based on this ideal of yourself, and each first date acts as a test of are you the person you said you were.

I recently found that I view myself as a hard working, outdoors, ambitious, fit, unconventional guy, but was quickly brought back to reality when my actions did not map to those ideals. This begs the question do I like the actually day to day of this person or just the idea?

But I don’t want this blog post to be a public internal reprimand, (I’ll do that in private)  I wanted to  share this insight I’ve found from the world of profile dating. Profile dating provides you with an excellent opportunity to define who you are and how you want to be seen and then you run mini experiments to test if those assumptions are valid. It is a good scientist’s wet dream.

You can run test after test with updating your profile and going on additional dates, and continue to update and iterate until you have a firm sense of who you are and how you want to be viewed.

I realized that this process is most people’s only attempt at self-reflection, and that is why it can feel so challenging and difficult to date – because we as humans are terrible at defining who we are and what we want. Most of us have spent more time thinking about  if we need to buy toilet paper than what we stand for and who we are as a person.

Going on a first date forces us to define who we are and everything happens in the public eye so we cannot change the outcomes and are forced to look at the results. If we do it in private we can deceive ourselves and influence the information. There is nothing like a ‘thanks for the drink but it’s not going anywhere’ to make you directly face the reality.