Update: I improved the profile of someone who reached out to me from this article. They went from zero matches in a year to ~2/week. I think this is roughly the effect size one should expect from following this advice: it's not going to take you from the 5th percentile to the 95th, but you can go from the 20th to the 70th or something. Executive Summary * While romantic preferences are idiosyncratic, certain attributes are widely considered attractive by heterosexual women. The evidence for this is particularly strong in populations frequently studied by psychologists (i.e. psychology undergraduate students). * My general advice is to consider these frequently-desired attributes and orient your profile towards signaling that you are at least average in each of them. They are: aesthetics, mental health, social capital, wealth, physical attractiveness, and niceness. * There is some evidence that women are risk-averse rather than expectation maximizing, i.e. it's more important to indicate that you are at least acceptable on each of these dimensions than it is to indicate that you are exceptional on one of them. If you only have two minutes If you only have 2 minutes, I would suggest the following exercise: > Imagine it's after your first date. Your date goes home and texts her group chat "you won't believe it but I met the most amazing guy! He _____." What's that thing she is so excited about? Make sure that thing is immediately visible from your profile. Epistemic Confidence Part of why I'm writing this is that I think people are terrible at dating by default, so even mediocre advice is likely to make them better. I do not claim that this advice will make any man more attractive to any woman, but do think it's quite likely to make the median man more attractive to the median woman. I have had writing this article on my to-do list for a while, and decided that I would never actually write it if every claim was individually cited. Instead, I am including a