Damona Hoffman
Celebrity Dating Coach
Damona Hoffman is a dating coach, on-air personality, and bestselling author. Her book "F the Fairy Tale" (2024) busts outdated dating myths and offers an empowering new approach to love. With over 15 years of experience, she's regular contributor to The Drew Barrymore Show, NPR, and NBC’s Access Daily. Damona has also written columns for The LA Times and The Washington Post. Additionally, she’s consulted for numerous dating apps including OkCupid, Match, and Bumble. Damona also hosts the award-winning podcast Dates & Mates.
Education
- B.S., Communications, Northwestern University
Professional Achievements
- Her book, "F the Fairy Tale", was endorsed by Drew Barrymore, Dr. Drew Pinksy, and Lori Gottlieb, and was a #1 Amazon bestseller
- Regular contributor to The Drew Barrymore Show, Access Daily with Mario Lopez, NPR, and NBC News
- Damona's podcast "Dates & Mates" has been listed as a top ten podcast by Cosmopolitan Magazine, HuffPost, and Mashable
- "Dates and Mates" won Best Podcast of the Year at the Black Podcasting Awards
- First Dating Coach in California certified by the IDCA (International Dating Coach Association)
- Hosted two reality TV series about dating and relationships
Certifications & Organizations
- IDCA Certified Dating Coach
Favorite Piece of Advice
Dating is a learned skill – we have all been fed a steady diet of rom-coms and fairy tales that have given us a false narrative about how love is supposed to just "happen" for us. This causes dissonance and frustration when it feels like we need to work to find our person. If you approach dating with curiosity and see it as a venue for self-growth, you can build relational skills that will aid in your dating life and impact every other person you interact with...including yourself. With a growth mindset around dating skills like profile writing, flirting, conversation techniques, texting, and even sex, you can rewrite any stories that have blocked you from finding your ultimate happily ever after.
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Forum Comments (4)
How do you start conversations on dating apps?
First of all, I recommend keeping your first message short and sweet. My easy formula is "comment plus question". I couple those two things together because the comment is saying something specific about the profile that you connected to personally, while the question is an invitation to move the conversation forward. And it gives you something to hang the conversation on. If you're just saying, “Hi” or “I liked your profile” or something generic, it tends to start the conversation out without any real momentum. However, you absolutely need momentum to drive the relationship forward if your goal is to ultimately move it off of the app and into real life. There are so many matches and options that people are sorting through that you need a simple framework like this to get conversations going. This way, you'll be able to stay in the game, sort through your matches, communicate effectively, and figure out what you need to know about someone before you go to the next step with them. Good luck!
What does a good dating profile look like for a guy?
I find that men often don't have selfies of themselves or great photos of just them–most of their pictures are group pics or action shots. So, if you don't have good photos, why not just get some professional photos taken that really show you in your element? Then, you can mix those in with other shots of you that are less flattering and polished. The general rule of thumb for anyone's profile is that you have to be the star of your profile. That means that pictures with other people potentially give someone a reason to say no to you or a reason to confuse you with other people in your photos. You want to keep the attention and the focus on you.
Use what I call the Three C's – Color, Context, and Character. Color is strategic. It is to stand out from the crowd. No white button downs. Anything that doesn't have a story to it or isn't memorable will get swiped past. And that primary photo is really important. If you consider it again, from the perspective of someone swiping, they're going through picture after picture after picture, they might not even be getting to your second photo. You have to give them a reason to stop and pay attention. Color is really strategic in that way. A lot of times, I'll recommend the color red, because we are psychologically conditioned to see red, stop, and pay attention.
The second C is context. If you go past someone's first photo and further into the profile, that's where we need the context. That's telling your story through your photos. What do you like to do? What part of town do you live in? Tell your story visually, conveyed at a glance. This approach gets that person more invested than if you've just written it on the page.
The third C is character. This is the one that most people forget. This is showing your personality. It's showing your fun side, your wild side, your quirky side, your goofy side, your nerdy side. It's the picture that usually someone will comment on because there is so much in there to unpack with the person. And that's really the goal of the profile. Get them to stop and pay attention. Get them to like you and then get them to engage with the message. I try to make my advice as actionable and simple as possible. And then just one more guideline that might be helpful for profile writing. You want to also have a mix of face and body photos. And you also want to be aware of the focal point of the photo. Where does the eye go when someone looks at your photo initially? A lot of the apps now will crop your picture to square. Again, consider it from the point of view of the person that is going to be looking at it and how they will see it. And sometimes, a picture that is cropped to square will not look the same. If it's like a full body or three-quarter shot, it will not look the same that you will not focus in on the same things when it is sort of shrunken down to square format.
Use what I call the Three C's – Color, Context, and Character. Color is strategic. It is to stand out from the crowd. No white button downs. Anything that doesn't have a story to it or isn't memorable will get swiped past. And that primary photo is really important. If you consider it again, from the perspective of someone swiping, they're going through picture after picture after picture, they might not even be getting to your second photo. You have to give them a reason to stop and pay attention. Color is really strategic in that way. A lot of times, I'll recommend the color red, because we are psychologically conditioned to see red, stop, and pay attention.
The second C is context. If you go past someone's first photo and further into the profile, that's where we need the context. That's telling your story through your photos. What do you like to do? What part of town do you live in? Tell your story visually, conveyed at a glance. This approach gets that person more invested than if you've just written it on the page.
The third C is character. This is the one that most people forget. This is showing your personality. It's showing your fun side, your wild side, your quirky side, your goofy side, your nerdy side. It's the picture that usually someone will comment on because there is so much in there to unpack with the person. And that's really the goal of the profile. Get them to stop and pay attention. Get them to like you and then get them to engage with the message. I try to make my advice as actionable and simple as possible. And then just one more guideline that might be helpful for profile writing. You want to also have a mix of face and body photos. And you also want to be aware of the focal point of the photo. Where does the eye go when someone looks at your photo initially? A lot of the apps now will crop your picture to square. Again, consider it from the point of view of the person that is going to be looking at it and how they will see it. And sometimes, a picture that is cropped to square will not look the same. If it's like a full body or three-quarter shot, it will not look the same that you will not focus in on the same things when it is sort of shrunken down to square format.
What are your favorite Bumble prompts?
I feel like any prompt that both shows emotion and creates a little bit of a question in it is the best. The prompt I like best is "I get way too excited about...". It's better than something like, “After work, you can find me...”. To me, that feels very expected and practical and down the middle. "I get way too excited about..." already has a tone of humor built into it because it's already in its essence sort of self-deprecating and shows “I'm not taking myself too seriously”. It is also a prompt that allows someone to reveal a little bit about their passions and who they are.
Why am I still single?
Do not give up! I would imagine that some of what you're feeling is societal pressure saying, “You're in your late 20s. You haven't met your person. What's wrong with you? What are you not doing? What are you doing wrong?” There can be this pressure in our society like we have to always be on the "escalator" of relationships. First of all, you just have to recognize that that timeline may not be yours. That may be somebody else's. And if you're disillusioned with the dating scene, I really try to just take that ‘dating’ word out of it like “I am just making friends and having conversations, making connections,” because as soon as we put that ‘dating’ label on it, that's when the stakes get ratcheted up and where the expectations start to unravel for us. And that always leads to disappointment.
I would quote Anne Lamott who said, “Expectations are resentments under construction.” Especially for daters who sort of came of age with online dating and with social media, I do hear a lot of disillusionment because there's this fantasy that dating was easier before. It wasn't. We are now demanding more from our partners. We don't just want a relationship of convenience. In the 1920s, the census data showed that people met and married someone who lived within five blocks of their house. We don't want that. We want someone who's going to travel with us. We want somebody who's going to be our business partner, our confidant, our best friend, our lover, our co-parent, our everything. And our expectations for what a successful relationship looks like have gotten higher. That is really what has led to more disillusionment in dating.
To be clear, I certainly think you can have it all. You should have a partner who has all of those things, but just give yourself a little bit of grace in knowing that it may take a little bit more time and it may take a little bit more effort to find someone who has all of those qualities! Just remember that everyone's timeline is different and try to see meeting people as making connections in a way that's fun and low-pressure.
I would quote Anne Lamott who said, “Expectations are resentments under construction.” Especially for daters who sort of came of age with online dating and with social media, I do hear a lot of disillusionment because there's this fantasy that dating was easier before. It wasn't. We are now demanding more from our partners. We don't just want a relationship of convenience. In the 1920s, the census data showed that people met and married someone who lived within five blocks of their house. We don't want that. We want someone who's going to travel with us. We want somebody who's going to be our business partner, our confidant, our best friend, our lover, our co-parent, our everything. And our expectations for what a successful relationship looks like have gotten higher. That is really what has led to more disillusionment in dating.
To be clear, I certainly think you can have it all. You should have a partner who has all of those things, but just give yourself a little bit of grace in knowing that it may take a little bit more time and it may take a little bit more effort to find someone who has all of those qualities! Just remember that everyone's timeline is different and try to see meeting people as making connections in a way that's fun and low-pressure.
