Holding the Message together: Cohesion and Coherence in Online Daters' Self-Description Texts

Abstract

A dating profile asks a writer to do something oddly demanding in just a few sentences: come across as coherent, likeable, and consistent, all at once, with almost no room to spare. This paper looks at how online daters manage that, examining the cohesive devices and coherence strategies holding their self-description texts together as single, readable messages. Working from Halliday and Hasan's (1976) model of cohesion, set within Halliday's (1994) wider Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, the analysis covers self-description texts from twenty-five purposively sampled daters across OkCupid, Bumble, Tinder, HER, and Facebook Dating. Each text was checked for grammatical cohesive devices, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesive devices, repetition and collocation, and the relative frequency of each device type was calculated across the corpus. Collocation came out on top, accounting for 36% of all cohesive ties identified. Conjunction followed at 26.3%, reference at 24.8%, ellipsis at 6.8%, repetition at 3.8%, and substitution at 2.3%. Looking more closely at individual profiles shows daters combining these devices with real strategy. Collocated phrases like "looking for" and "swipe left" carry meanings specific to the dating-app register. Conjunctions set up logical and conditional relationships between what a dater expects and what they offer. Anaphoric reference keeps a single, coherent persona running across successive clauses. This is not grammatical correctness pursued for its own sake. Cohesion in online dating profiles works as an active resource, something daters use, whether they realise it or not, to build interpretable, unified self-presentations under conditions of extreme brevity. The paper closes by considering what this means for the broader study of digital self-presentation and computer-mediated register.