What Makes a Dating Profile Attractive?

Spending hours over that online dating profile? Unsure whether to use humor, brutal honesty, or a headshot that’s a decade and change old and filtered to hell and back? Before you finalize everything, you might want to check your grammar and run a spell-check.

A growing body of research suggests that readers of your profile assess your attentiveness and intelligence based on grammar, spelling, and typos. Two recent studies analyzed the roles played by writing in online profiles. At Tilburg University in the Netherlands, researchers contacted 800 members of a large online dating website and supplied them with fictitious profiles, both with and without language errors. Researchers then asked study participants to rate the attractiveness of the profile owners.

Readers perceived typographical errors like “teh” for “the” and “HELlo” for “Hello” as signals of inattentiveness. And lower attentiveness scores made the writers seem less attractive. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors also made the profile owners seem less intelligent. The equivalent of using “Their” for “They’re” led readers to judge the writers as less intelligent and—once again—less attractive.

Researchers had hypothesized that informal language and emoticons might lead readers to find profile writers to be more informal and, thus, warmer, than their word-perfect counterparts. Instead, writers who avoided errors were also seen as warmer than the less-than-stellar writers.

Think social media has relaxed our standards toward niceties like using full words, rather than letters and emojis? Maybe not—at least for dating profiles. In a survey of 5,000 singletons using a US dating website, 88% of women and 75% of men ranked good use of grammar and punctuation ahead of confidence and good teeth. The study, published in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, speculated that, without face to face interactions, small cues, like writing style, can take on greater importance as users try to gauge attractiveness online.