I want to introduce you to another SMP team member: our bio writer extraordinaire and coach, Max!

So many of you who have worked with me already know (and love) Max. Max is the type of person who has that rare ability to ask questions that get you to reveal the most fundamental and most uniquely interesting parts of yourself, which he then expertly crafts into bios and prompt answers that help you to leap off the page on dating apps.

Max is so good at this because he’s both a gifted writer and an experienced online dater. He writes a free Substack newsletter that I can’t recommend highly enough for his musings on work-life philosophy, book critiques, stories of success and failure, art in its many facets, and so much more. (Make sure you subscribe!)

This week, he wrote “Some Quick Tips on Finding Love”—and it is the perfect distillation of everything I preach at Style My Profile, but in a fresh voice that drives the points home with blunt clarity. Read on for a few of my favorite highlights…

There’s only one thing to decide on a first date: do I want to see this person one more time?

I often found it hard, on early dates, to avoid extrapolating my entire relationship with someone from an offhand comment they’d made or a snap judgment I’d formed about them… What worked for me was employing something like a harm reduction approach to evaluation: reminding myself that I wasn’t trying to decide whether or not I was going to spend the rest of my life with this person, just whether or not I wanted to see them one more time.
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Narrow your list of non-negotiables

In my side gig as a dating app profile ghostwriter, I often encounter clients with comically long lists of requirements in a partner.

I understand where these people are coming from, but really, I think there are only three hard and fast requirements in a partner: that you have fun together, that you communicate well, and that you’re aligned on the big questions like whether or not to have kids. Everything else is potentially negotiable.
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That’s not to say that you won’t end up selecting for more than those three conditions, just that it’s foolish to think you’re actually sure of what else you’re looking for. When you create a long list of attributes you desire, you’re thinking about what you, right now, want (or think that you want). But the person in most of your relationship won’t be the current you—it’ll be the series of future yous that you become over time, and who knows what they’ll want. You might have some ideas, of course, but better to think of them as hunches to be explored than true requirements.

For more from Max about whether your dating selection process is sound, how to separate what you want in a partner from what you want in yourself, the benefits of casual sex, and why you should have at least one really bad breakup, you can read his whole post here.

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Happy Dating!

Alyssa
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p.s. I bet you have a bunch of thoughts of your own—and probably a bunch of questions of your own!—about all of these topics! We discuss all this and more in the safe space of Meet Your Match Group Coaching. Our next session (capped at 7 people!) is starting in May. Read more here and then set up a call with me to discuss if the group is right for you 😊

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