How anonymous should my profile be?

Knowing whether your profile should be sort of anonymous on a dating site depends on why you are on the site. Decide if you want to meet people or just talk initially. If you never want to meet someone, let them know this is a chat only thing and no physical meet will happen. If they are cool with that, then you might find it gives you the feeling of personal and emotional safety to talk about whatever you want to – even very personal matters. Just be careful that you don’t mislead or be hurtful to someone. That said, such conversations can be quite liberating and go places that you’d never normally go to with someone, perhaps even if you’ve known them personally for years (especially, to state the obvious, if the conversation is about sex). 

On the other hand, don’t be a mystery-man or mystery-woman and give away nothing when getting to know people. What’s the point of that if you are actually looking for a potential partner? Do look out for your own well-being though… Personally I would not be sharing things like your surname, Facebook or LinkedIn pages, home address (or even Post Code), landline phone number, your usual email address (think about getting one just for dating communications instead), company or location where you work, or favourite local pubs. I’m ambivalent about WhatsApp and other messaging apps (you may have to share your mobile number, so make sure you know how to block someone before you give this out, and make sure it is not a backdoor for them to get a whole lot of information about you which you don’t want to broadcast).

While most people are fine, there are some crazy people out there – more so on some dating sites than on others. If you are straight-forward about this, very few people will take even mild offence… And if they do, then you just learnt something valuable about them and know you should move on to chatting with someone else.