It is almost certainly the shit pictures. If you are in “too good to be true” territory, you will be getting matches, but women will be asking you things like “are you real?” and “are you a model?”
As I said, grab a bro or a tripod. A friend is better - but said friend should almost certainly also be a single male friend with a strong focus on improving their dating profile. No one else will be as dedicated. Professional photogs can also be helpful, but for anything beyond “school photo” shots, you will really be racking up the bills. Shooting good photos takes a lot of time and effort, so your friend and photographer will need to show up again and again and again in order for you to build a good profile. Ime, it takes about 2-3h on average to get one photo, including finding a location, setting up equipment, figuring out a good pose, working with lighting, etc. Then you should shoot somewhere between 500 and 1000 shots - iterating, messing around with lighting and posing, etc. And then, typically, only 1 in 3-5 photos you spend the time shooting is actually good enough to include in your profile. So if you and your bro go out 5 days per week and shoot for 5 hours each day (2.5h for each of you), you should expect to generate one good photo for the apps each week.
Or you could use a tripod and remote shutter. The downside here is that you have no one to push you out the door to actually do the work, no one to give another opinion on how the shots look or what to try, you have to line up all your shots yourself and iterate time and again with delayed feedback, and there is no one around to take the edge off the fact that you are posing in front of a camera alone in public which is incredibly awkward. But the upside is that your tripod won’t complain about waking up at 4:30 am so you can shoot for 2 hours during the golden hour.
Other possibilties: you are shooting yourself in the foot with your bio; you live in a metro of less than 1mil (or SF); your misanthropy and social isolation are etched into your face and posture, and this comes through in the pics you currently have. Don’t worry, you can hide this last one with the law of large numbers in your pics. But also… it’s something to work on long term
Edit:
Re: fat loss. If you can cut down to abs and get a shirtless shot, its a bug win. But not necessary to get matches.
Re: clothes. Make sure your clothes aren’t just “nice”, but are cool or stylish, hopefully expressing something about who you are.
Carrying anything on my face is a terrifying prospect, IDK if it’s an autistic thing but I can’t do many expressions that don’t look obviously forced.
And I do live in a metro of less than 1m, but I believe my range goes up to a metro of > 1m.
The clothes I have now are stylish. But I have no photos in them yet.
But more importantly, I think I’ve just realized I’m really not ready to date, no matter how strong my desire for intimacy is. I’ll be going through some medicine changes and therapy. Maybe I’ll re look at this after.
It is almost certainly the shit pictures. If you are in “too good to be true” territory, you will be getting matches, but women will be asking you things like “are you real?” and “are you a model?”
As I said, grab a bro or a tripod. A friend is better - but said friend should almost certainly also be a single male friend with a strong focus on improving their dating profile. No one else will be as dedicated. Professional photogs can also be helpful, but for anything beyond “school photo” shots, you will really be racking up the bills. Shooting good photos takes a lot of time and effort, so your friend and photographer will need to show up again and again and again in order for you to build a good profile. Ime, it takes about 2-3h on average to get one photo, including finding a location, setting up equipment, figuring out a good pose, working with lighting, etc. Then you should shoot somewhere between 500 and 1000 shots - iterating, messing around with lighting and posing, etc. And then, typically, only 1 in 3-5 photos you spend the time shooting is actually good enough to include in your profile. So if you and your bro go out 5 days per week and shoot for 5 hours each day (2.5h for each of you), you should expect to generate one good photo for the apps each week.
Or you could use a tripod and remote shutter. The downside here is that you have no one to push you out the door to actually do the work, no one to give another opinion on how the shots look or what to try, you have to line up all your shots yourself and iterate time and again with delayed feedback, and there is no one around to take the edge off the fact that you are posing in front of a camera alone in public which is incredibly awkward. But the upside is that your tripod won’t complain about waking up at 4:30 am so you can shoot for 2 hours during the golden hour.
Other possibilties: you are shooting yourself in the foot with your bio; you live in a metro of less than 1mil (or SF); your misanthropy and social isolation are etched into your face and posture, and this comes through in the pics you currently have. Don’t worry, you can hide this last one with the law of large numbers in your pics. But also… it’s something to work on long term
Edit:
Re: fat loss. If you can cut down to abs and get a shirtless shot, its a bug win. But not necessary to get matches.
Re: clothes. Make sure your clothes aren’t just “nice”, but are cool or stylish, hopefully expressing something about who you are.
Carrying anything on my face is a terrifying prospect, IDK if it’s an autistic thing but I can’t do many expressions that don’t look obviously forced.
And I do live in a metro of less than 1m, but I believe my range goes up to a metro of > 1m.
The clothes I have now are stylish. But I have no photos in them yet.
But more importantly, I think I’ve just realized I’m really not ready to date, no matter how strong my desire for intimacy is. I’ll be going through some medicine changes and therapy. Maybe I’ll re look at this after.