Endlessly scrolling and swiping on apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble can be soul-destroying.
You can tend to wonder why that person didn’t match you back, whether your photos are good enough, or maybe you’re desperate for your prompts to be funny.
This is all in the name of finding that special someone but, according to science, there’s one thing your dating profile is likely missing if you’re not getting the matches you want.
A lot of daters routinely leave out what we would like to know about our potential partner. It’s this detail that is the most important thing to include, according to professor Juliana Schroeder.
We all spend so much time trying to sell ourselves – writing how much we love to run marathons, backpack around the world or do Reformer Pilates – that we don’t express any interest in wanting to know things about others.
In her recent paper ‘Feeling Known Predicts Relationship Satisfaction’, Juliana says: ‘People want to be known, so they’re looking for partners who will know them and support them, but because other people also want to be known, they end up writing these not-super-appealing profiles when trying to attract partners.’
It makes a lot of sense, after all its common to get that feel-good feeling when someone remembers a little detail about you. You feel like they made the effort to know you.
So, if you say something like ‘what I’d love to know about you is…’ on your dating profile, there’s a good chance you’re going to be more successful in your endeavour to find love.
Schroeder, from the University of California, examined profiles from dating sites Match.com and Coffee Meets Bagel, rating more than 50% of the writers’ profiles as wanting to be known by a potential partner, while only about 20% expressed a desire to know their potential partner.
The professor then asked participants to write their own profiles, either emphasising being known or getting to know the other person.
Then, more than 250 other people rated these profiles on a scale of one to seven, according to how much they found them appealing and how much they would potentially want to contact them.
Schroeder and co-author Ayelet Fishbach found that the preferred profiles were the ones emphasising wanting to know the other person.
So, there’s a key takeaway if you’re thinking about re-downloading Hinge after deleting it for the tenth time. ‘What [you] want to be doing is saying, “I really care about you, and I’m going to get to know you and be there for you and listen to you and be a great partner”,’ explains Schroeder.
This doesn’t just apply to romantic couples though. Showing interest in getting to know someone can strengthen all bonds including friends, family, neighbours and work colleagues.
‘Of course, people say they want to know their relationship partner and support their partner,” says Schroeder. ‘But that’s not actually the thing that makes them happiest in their relationships. People feel happier in relationships where they feel like they are being supported—and for that, they have to be known.’
Fishbach began researching with Schroeder 10 years ago when they stumbled upon the vessel effect. It’s a fancy term for the phenomenon where patients want their doctors not to have emotions of their own, so they can ‘fully attend to them and feel their pain’.
The pair then conducted an experiment to see how well participants knew a family member, partner or friend, compared to how well they thought they were known by that person – they also had to rate their relationship satisfaction from one to seven.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, people tended to think they knew the other person better than that person knew them. Those who were more satisfied in their relationship felt more known by the other person.
Schroeder explains: ‘People think they are unique and special and have a lot of complexity to them, so other people just don’t know their true self, whereas once they know one thing about the other person, they’re like “I know you. Done”.’
The feeling that so few people really know us could be the reason we value it so highly in relationships.
The only dynamic in which the theory doesn’t really apply is a parent-child relationship, which makes a lot of sense because the theory is about support.
‘The thing that predicts relationship satisfaction is not how well they think their child knows them, it’s how well they know their child,’ says Schroeder. ‘It’s the one relationship where it’s very clear the parent needs to be supporting the child.’
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