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How to write the open answers on your card

2 September 2026·7 min read·By The Zugot Project team

"I'm a happy person, I love to laugh, looking for a home of Torah and kindness." That sentence appears on thousands of cards and distinguishes none of them. The problem isn't that it's untrue — it's that it's true of everyone.

Why this part carries most of the weight

The structured fields do important and limited work. They establish who is relevant at all — age range, outlook, region — and rank closeness on dimensions that can be measured. What they cannot do is easy to state: there is no field that distinguishes between two people who filled in exactly the same answers.

And in this population there are many such people. Two twenty-six-year-old men, dati leumi, from the centre, with the same level of observance and the same list of hobbies, can be two entirely different people. The difference between them exists only in the free text.

The first rule: a scene, not an adjective

Most people write adjectives. "Calm", "ambitious", "family-oriented", "a people person". An adjective is a conclusion someone drew about themselves, and it carries almost no information — because everyone draws the flattering conclusions about themselves.

What does carry information is a scene. Instead of "family-oriented", write what happens at your Friday night table and who's sitting around it. Instead of "ambitious", write what you're trying to achieve in the next two years and why that in particular. Instead of "I love cooking", write what you make when someone turns up at short notice.

The difference isn't stylistic. A scene contains details you can't invent without thinking, and so it distinguishes — two people writing "family-oriented" have written the same thing, and two people describing their Friday night will write two completely different things.

Why the leisure questions are worded as they are

Several questions on the card look trivial at first: how you host, what you do on a quiet Shabbat afternoon, what cooking looks like in your home. They aren't there as filler.

A description of a leisure activity exposes three things at once. It exposes the content — what you actually do. It exposes the style — whether it's organised or spontaneous, alone or with people, quiet or loud. And it exposes aesthetics and humour, which are the two dimensions that most predict whether a conversation between two people will flow, and which there's no other way to collect.

And as we've seen elsewhere, the kind of leisure itself carries meaning: activity requiring interaction predicts couple cohesion far better than parallel activity. A detailed description of how you host says more about compatibility than a list of favourite series.

Length and detail are themselves information

A point worth saying explicitly: not only what is written is read, but how. The level of detail, the length of sentences, the degree of deliberation visible in the text — all of these sketch a communication style and a register.

This isn't a test, and there are no extra marks for a long text. A concise person writing three precise lines isn't "worse" than someone writing a paragraph — they're simply two styles, and whoever suits one doesn't necessarily suit the other. The literature on cognitive complexity in relationships suggests that closeness in register is itself what predicts agreement and cohesion.

The practical conclusion is to write the way you speak. Anyone trying to write "properly" erases precisely the signal that would have brought them someone who speaks the way they do.

Red lines: concrete, not polite

The questions about what you can't live with are read differently from all the rest: not to rank, but to exclude. So vague phrasing in them does real damage.

"I'm looking for someone calm" isn't a red line — it's a preference, and it can't be checked. "I can't cope with shouting" is a red line. "A good relationship with family matters to me" is a preference. "I couldn't live with someone who doesn't say what's bothering her until it explodes" is a red line.

The question to ask yourself while writing: could someone reading this look at a particular person and decide whether they meet it. If not — it isn't yet a red line, it's a description of an atmosphere.

A few things not to do

• Don't write what sounds good, write what's true. A card describing someone you hope to be brings you matches for that someone, and you'll find the gap on the date.
• Don't list adjectives separated by commas. Three sentences with details beat twelve positive words.
• Don't leave questions blank out of a feeling that there's nothing to say. An unanswered question doesn't produce a neutral match — it simply removes an entire dimension from the calculation.
• Don't understate on the questions about sensitivities. A shrunken answer there produces exactly the kind of candidate opposite whom that sensitivity will open again.
• Don't be wary of details that sound small. "I'm up early even on Shabbat" is real information; "I'm a person with a routine" isn't.

One check at the end

When you've finished, read the card and ask one question: would someone who knows me recognise that this is me, without the name.

If the answer is yes, the card is doing its job. If the answer is that it could be anyone — there are adjectives in there where scenes should be, and it's worth swapping one of them for a story.