Which profile prompts are worth answering

Prompts exist to give the other person something to reply to. Judge every answer you write by exactly one standard: could someone build a message out of this? If not, it's decoration.

The ones that work

• Anything asking for a specific opinion. Strong opinions about small things are the best possible prompt material — they're easy to argue with, and arguing about nothing is flirting.
• Anything about your actual routine. "My Sunday looks like..." gives a picture of a life someone can imagine being in.
• Anything inviting a recommendation. People love giving them, and it hands them a ready-made opener.
• Anything you can answer with a tiny true story. Stories beat statements every time.

The ones to skip

• "Two truths and a lie." Every profile has it and it produces one guessing message, then nothing.
• Anything fishing for a compliment. It sets a strange tone before hello.
• "The way to win me over is..." which usually turns into a list of instructions.
• Anything cynical about dating. World-weary is not a vibe anyone swipes towards.

Be specific to the point of oddity

"I love food" is nothing. "I have made the same lentil thing every Sunday for two years and I'm not bored yet" is a person. The second one sounds almost too mundane to include, which is precisely why it works — nobody else has written it.

"Irrationally competitive about: pub quizzes, parallel parking, and who loaded the dishwasher better."

Answer more than one

Empty prompt slots read as low effort, and they leave the reader with nothing but photos to go on. Three good answers is plenty; six is a wall of text nobody finishes.

And then use theirs

The other half of the trick: when you message someone, build the opener out of their prompt rather than their photos. It's the difference between "you're gorgeous" — which they've read forty times — and a message that could only have been written to them.

The short version

• Judge every answer by whether someone could reply to it.
• Opinions, routines and recommendations beat jokes.
• Skip two-truths-and-a-lie and anything world-weary.
• Be so specific it feels mundane — that's what sounds real.