A List of Things to Talk About on Match.com Other Than Fucking Zumba

Match.com has released its 2014 Year in Review report, and apparently, people don’t have very much to mention about themselves other than “Zumba” and Frozen. Listen, love in the time of cholera internet dating can be rough. The whole idea of looking for a partner based on the pretense of personal branding is a bit strange, and it’s intimidating to have to set yourself apart from a million other users, but people. Let’s find something better to talk about.

Of course Zumba wasn’t the only painfully inoffensive and uninteresting activity people used to showcase themselves. Betabeat reports:

[T]he word “travel” was mentioned 1,005,346 times across all Match.com profiles; the phrase “down to earth” saw 232,348 mentions.

“Zumba” tops the list of most common words people used in their profiles. Also at the top of the list are “Electrician,” “Welcoming,” “Warmhearted,” “Crochet,” “Quickest,” “Cosmetology,” “Ladies” (you can just hear the frat bros now) and “Sewing.”

Both the word “selfie” and the movie Frozen were mentioned more than 5,000 times. Alright folks. Internet dating is dumb and hard, but luckily the Mistress of Love (me, duh) is here to help you clean up those profiles so you can shine like the bright star that you are in this Milky Way of dreary profiles. So here are some tried and tested topics that you can use to turn your profile from drab to marginally better:

Books: Honestly, talking about Twilight or god help us, Catcher in the Rye (personal dealbreaker) is fucking boring. But let’s think outside of the box: talk about your favorite edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. I hear the one from 1742 was killer.

Hobbies: Everybody loves a good hobby, but if want to include “Crocheting” or “Sewing,” THINK AGAIN. Do you really want to be just another statistic in a dating website year-end report?! Consider including different needle-oriented activities like acupuncture or donating blood or doing meth.

Exercise: Obviously we want to avoid talking about Zumba. But it’s not like bragging about your Crossfit kips is a much better option. To make yourself really stand out, talk about your weekly fight club. Bonus points for including a picture of the necklace you made out of the teeth you knocked out of your opponents.

Serial: Sure, everybody’s wondering if Adnan Syed really killed Hae Min Lee. But a much more interesting topic is to talk about your favorite serial killer. Are you a Zodiac? Or are you more of an Elizabeth Báthory? Dammit, where’s that “Which Serial Killer Are You?” BuzzFeed quiz when you really need it?!

Animals: People fucking love talking about their pets. It’s almost as if it’s another living creature to whom they have an emotional attachment. To really set yourself apart, share your own exploits in amateur taxidermy. Should really put some “stuffing” in the conversation. Get it!?

Other great topics to consider:

• What Pat Sajak’s deal has been lately
• Why they haven’t made Oreos with a single cookie sandwiched between two discs of frosting
• The effect of isolationist foreign policy of Edo-era Japan
• Why you think fucking Linda from Finance always gives you that look
• Really not feeling all that bad when your grandmother died
• Where all the cowboys have gone
• The size of Jolly Green Giant’s penis on a scale from Subway car to Subway sandwich (party size, obvi)

Oh, and when it comes to self-description, don’t sell yourself short with boring adjectives like “warmhearted” and “down-to-earth.” Really go for gold and use those SAT vocab words: effulgent, beslubbering, parsimonious, uxorious, etc.

Now go out there and get ’em, tiger.

Image via Shutterstock.