Your dating profile is a shopping list — and that's why it's not working

American Psychological Association / Psychology of Popular Media

Open any dating app right now and scroll through a few profiles. You'll see the same architecture repeated endlessly: height, job title, a handful of hobbies, maybe a quote about loving tacos or hiking. It reads like a product spec sheet. And according to new research, that's exactly the problem.

A series of experiments published in Psychology of Popular Media found that dating profiles built around storytelling — not bullet-pointed traits — generate substantially more empathy and romantic interest from potential matches. The kicker: the underlying facts don't change. Same hobbies, same background, same person. The difference is entirely in how the information is delivered.

The marketing trick that works on hearts, too

The researchers behind the study, led by Gurit Birnbaum, a psychology professor at Reichman University in Israel, borrowed their hypothesis from an unlikely place: advertising. Marketers have known for decades that narrative ads — the ones that follow a character through a situation rather than listing product features — sell more products. They create emotional engagement. They make consumers feel something about a laundry detergent or a car.

Birnbaum and co-author Kobi Zholtack wanted to know whether the same mechanism operates in the very personal marketplace of online dating. Do we respond to potential partners the way we respond to products? And if storytelling makes us care more about a brand, does it make us care more about a stranger on a screen?

The short answer: yes. Consistently and across multiple formats.

Three experiments, one clear pattern

The team ran three experiments with 594 single young adults total. Each experiment followed the same logic: show participants dating profiles containing identical information, presented in either a narrative or non-narrative format. Then measure two things — empathy for the person in the profile and romantic interest in them.

In the first experiment, participants read text-only profiles. The non-narrative version stated flat facts: this person plays guitar, studies economics, likes to travel. The narrative version wove those same facts into a story. The guitar wasn't just a hobby — it was a gift from a grandfather, and music became a thread running through the person's life. Same guitar. Same person. Completely different emotional response.

The second experiment shifted to photo-based profiles. In the non-narrative condition, photos showed the person in neutral settings — a park, a street corner. In the narrative condition, the images told a visual story: the person exercising, studying, spending time with friends. The photos implied a life being lived rather than a pose being struck.

The third experiment combined both — text and photos together, in either narrative or non-narrative arrangements.

Across all three experiments, the pattern held. Narrative profiles triggered more empathy, and that empathy predicted greater romantic interest. The mechanism was consistent regardless of whether participants were reading words, looking at photos, or doing both.

Empathy as the hidden engine

What's particularly interesting here is the mediating variable: empathy. The profiles didn't just make people more attracted to the potential date — they made people feel for the potential date first. The attraction followed the emotional connection, not the other way around.

This matters because it points to something specific about what storytelling does in this context. A list of traits invites evaluation. Tall enough? Interesting job? Good taste in music? It's a checkbox exercise. A story, by contrast, invites perspective-taking. You're not assessing — you're imagining. You're briefly inhabiting someone else's experience, and that act of imagination generates warmth.

Birnbaum frames this in direct opposition to the transactional dynamics that dominate most dating platforms. The swipe-based model, by design, encourages rapid evaluation of people as bundles of attributes. Storytelling pushes against that current. It humanizes. It slows the viewer down just enough to feel something.

What a "narrative profile" actually looks like

It's worth being concrete about what the researchers mean by narrative, because the word can sound vague. They're not talking about writing a short story or crafting literary fiction. The difference between the two profile types in these experiments was structural, not artistic.

A non-narrative profile presents disconnected facts: I play guitar. I study economics. I like to travel. A narrative profile connects those facts causally or chronologically: My grandfather gave me a guitar when I was seven. I played in a band through high school, studied economics in college but kept gigging on weekends, and last summer I busked my way through Portugal.

Same information. But in the second version, there's a character with a past, a trajectory, a life that hangs together. The reader can see a person rather than a list of features.

The limits of the swipe

The study does have boundaries worth noting. All 594 participants were young adults — a demographic that's heavily represented on dating apps but doesn't capture the full range of people using them. The profiles were researcher-constructed, not pulled from real apps, which means they were optimized for the comparison being tested. In the wild, narrative profiles might be poorly written, excessively long, or self-indulgent in ways that undermine the effect.

There's also the platform question. Dating apps are architected for speed. Tinder gives you a photo, a name, an age, and a few lines of text. The affordances of the platform actively discourage the kind of storytelling this research endorses. Whether users would actually read a narrative profile — or whether the algorithm would even surface it effectively — is a practical question this study doesn't address.

And there's a selection effect to consider. People who write narrative profiles might already be more emotionally intelligent, more reflective, or simply better communicators. The profile format might be a signal of those qualities rather than the cause of the attraction.

Against the commodity model

Still, the finding taps into a genuine frustration that many dating app users report: the sense that the whole enterprise reduces people to commodities. Birnbaum argues that storytelling actively counters this tendency, motivating people to see potential dates as fellow human beings rather than options in an endless catalog.

There's an irony here. The technology that was supposed to expand our romantic possibilities may have inadvertently flattened them. By optimizing for efficiency — quick profiles, fast swipes, maximum throughput — dating apps may have stripped away the very thing that makes someone attractive: their story. The messy, particular, irreducible narrative of a life.

The fix, this research suggests, isn't a new algorithm or a better matching system. It's older than any technology. Tell someone who you are. Not what you are — who.