Hooking up is hard enough without getting in your own way. Online dating is perilous enough when the main anxiety is vibing with another person, not protecting your digital privacy. And yet, people repeatedly sabotage their chances of success — often before they’ve even made a match.
If you’re a loyal AdultFriendFinder user and want to use the site safely and effectively, here are three things you need to keep off your profile.
Credit: AdultFriendFinder
Public-facing NSFW content
AdultFriendFinder is very permissive when it comes to NSFW content, and many of its members take advantage of this freedom, but we advise against it, especially if you also plan on sharing pictures or videos of your face.
Hookup apps for everyone
AdultFriendFinder
—
readers’ pick for casual connections
Tinder
—
top pick for finding hookups
Hinge
—
popular choice for regular meetups
There are plenty of more private ways to bare all, but reserve your profile photos for non-nude content. Once you post naked content online, you lose all control over where it ends up or what it gets used for.
Mashable Trend Report
And just as important as the safety considerations is the hookup consideration: while some people will be turned on by nudity from the jump, others will be put off by it. If you want to maximize your chances at making a connection, you’re better off leaving something to the imagination and finding other ways to be sexually suggestive.
Unnecessary personal information
Another major security concern people often overlook: oversharing. No, your potential hookups don’t need to know what you do for a living, at least not from your profile, and they certainly don’t need to know specifics about your employer or your marital situation.
Think very hard about what you choose to share and how that information might lead back to you, not because the person you end up talking to is likely to be a bad actor but because it’s the internet and there are bad actors everywhere. Online safety 101: share the bare minimum, and if you do choose to open up to a specific person, make sure you’ve vetted them and that they are who they say they are.
Sexual boasting
Hookup sites in general, and AdultFriendFinder in particular, seems to be littered with (mostly male) profiles bragging about their sexual prowess, often in very crude terms. We understand the impulse to boast, especially when you’re trying to connect with another human being on a sexual level, but bragging is always off-putting and never sexy, at least not in this context.
Save your sexual boasting for one-on-one conversations, once some rapport has been established and you have a sense of the other person’s turn-ons.
