10 Things Not to Include in Your Online Dating Profile—and What to Say Instead

Article on Oprah.com shows you how to save yourself, FROM yourself.
Your dating profile may be your worst enemy... don't let this happen to you:

Something has happened to the prune. I don't know why, I don't know how, I only know that I was at the supermarket one fine morning, minding my own business, when suddenly I came face to face with "the sun-dried plum."

I will tell you right now that I'm a fan of the prune—particularly when it's in Danish form—but the prune was clearly not selling. For the prune to turn heads (not to mention meet a nice guy, move to the suburbs, and have a couple of baby prunes) it needed a fresh marketing strategy. Which brings us to today's subject: the online dating profile.

I've got a number of brilliant, beautiful, frank, funny friends, all capable of remarkable things, but writing an enticing online profile does not seem to be one of them. That's where I come in. Some people offer their services in soup kitchens, some volunteer to shampoo crude oil off of sad, gooey pelicans; I rewrite online dating profiles.

It all started when my pal Paula asked me to figure out why she wasn't getting a response to her JDate ad. I didn't have to read beyond her opening sentence—"I like the library!"—to know why. All the exclamation points in the world couldn't save that line. "But I was being honest," Paula groaned. "Why can't I find somebody who gets that?"

What I get is that we all want to be loved for exactly who we are. But surely there's a juicier way to bring up your literary fetish. "Dewey Decimal? You bet we do!"

It wasn't long before news that I'd taken Paula's profile from drab to fab spread far and wide (okay, a couple of people in Brooklyn heard). Soon I was averaging 3.5 profile punch-ups a week. I've seen the dumb, the dull, and the klutzy; the bitter, the brazen, and the too cute by half. I've studied strangers on the Web and friends at my kitchen table, and here's what I've learned:

• False modesty is, well...false. Still, I urged my friend to follow her goddess-like self-description of "an award-winning microbiologist who is Nigella Lawson in the kitchen and Megan Fox in the bedroom" with "I'm absolutely tone-deaf, and I can't ski, but I'd be open to a lesson or two." Soon she was swooshing down a bunny slope with an ophthalmologist from St. Paul. You see, you're better off copping to a humanizing flaw than coming across as too good to be true. (Mother Teresa was too good to be true, and nobody ever saw her having sushi with James Franco on a Saturday night.)
  
  
• My friend Carol, on the other hand, is not one to blow her own horn. "I'm divorced, with a grouchy teenager and an incontinent beagle," she writes, neglecting to mention that she's also a total babe and one of the top labor lawyers in the country. "I wanted to be funny," she explains. Funny is good, I like funny, and God knows I enjoy a bladder control reference as much as the next guy.... Wait a second, I just remembered something: Guys don't like that. Let's save the fact that little Snoopy is in diapers for the fourth date.

Next: "Lunch meat makes me wheeze uncontrollably and break into hives the size of Ping-Pong balls—but I probably wouldn't lead with this information"

Baby Boomer Dating - Guys Need Advice Too

If you are a Baby Boomer guy you don't need to feel left out when it comes to getting some great advice about how to attract and date a Baby Boomer lady. Sometimes it can come as a bit of a wake up call for many Boomer males, that the reason why they aren't getting the date is not because of the ladies that they are meeting, it is due to the way that the Boomer guy is projecting himself.

If you're over 50 and a Baby Boomer guy then you can be sure that there are a few things that Boomer ladies are telling me that they need from you in order to find you date-worthy and then go on to be partner-material. I deal with mostly Boomer ladies and I can tell you, they are desperately wanting to meet guys from their own generation, but they don't want to settle for someone who is too much hard work.

So how do you project yourself to attract a Boomer lady? The number one attribute that my Boomer ladies tell me they find attractive in a date is a Boomer males confidence. If you can portray yourself as being confident, not second guessing yourself and make choices and decisions without prompting or coercion then the Boomer ladies will find this one of the most attractive features regardless of your perhaps receding hairline or extra few pounds.

You may already know that you can actually trick your mind into thinking that you are actually a confident and positive individual. Interestingly, your mind will actually convince itself that that is indeed true. So, if you were to "play" that you were all of these things then it wouldn't be long until your mind actually believed it. We also know that a positive and happy person is far more attractive to others than those that display the opposite in demeanour.

If you think you may need some extra help and perhaps "polish" on your dating technique, then I offer you the same guide that I direct my Boomer ladies to read. I have included the link for it below. Sometimes we need to put ourselves out there into a situation where we can pretend to be sometimes the complete opposite to who we have been feeling we are. This alone can spark some good feelings and vibes within you that may be able to heat up and start a whole new chapter for you.

Conversation Chemistry Learn how to put an end to communication blunders with the opposite sex, and discover how you can use powerful body language in ways that will create, build and maintain unstoppable attraction.

Piper S. McKenzie is a Relationship and Dating mentor. She has been writing about making intimate human connections for over a decade. Learn more here Winning Relationships