A friend of mine just placed a personal ad and is in the process of looking at the responses. I looked at a bunch of them, and it seems like they fall into three categories:
Thoughtful, specific response to her ad;
Canned, pre-done response;
What the hell is this person thinking?
Really. What the hell are some of these people thinking? One response was from a “high level marketing professional” and he told her everything…right down to the type of car he drove (now it’s an SUV because he wanted to get away from all the sports cars he’s had in the past) and size weights he uses to work out. Then, he included a picture of him with a gorgeous woman. WTF? He said that he was sorry about the inclusion of his “friend” but that he didn’t have a picture of just him. Riiiight. How insecure can you get? Hey!! Here’s proof that attractive women dig me!!
Good God.
Another guy told her that his “patients” found him to be quite attractive. This is doubly troublesome: 1) his utterly tacky “cleverness” at profession-dropping; i.e., he is someone who has “patients” (my friend could hardly contain herself when she realized she may just snag herself a Doctah!!) and 2) why are his patients telling him how attractive he is? That makes my ethics sniffer twitch.
Also of note is that my friend couldn’t have been any clearer on who she is, and it’s pretty obvious (on paper/computer screen) that her interests (or being, for that matter) are completely incompatible with both these guys. What are their reasons for even answering her ad? The fact that she (probably) has a functioning vagina?
She had some sort of condition that made sex agonizingly painful for her (it may have been endometriosis – I never got the details). Finally, in her mid-twenties, she had an operation that rectified the condition. She was single, but she was really eager to find out how sex felt.
So she placed a personal ad, looking for a man within a certain age range who was a cool guy who she could have sex with.
You can imagine the number of responses she got. We would sit around as she read the best ones to us.
My favorite was the guy who wrote, “I’m 55, which is older than you asked for in your ad. But you’re heavier than I like, too, so that’s okay.”
“You’ll have to excuse any typos I make. All the hundred dollar bills in my wallet force me to sit at an angle, occasionally causing me to make typing errors. You should hear my employees tease me when I send out updates on how well the company is doing with the words “revenues up tenfold” misspelled! It’s outrageous! Anyway, I’m really interested in getting to know you better. Perhaps you could let me call you? I’d give you my number but my home phone is broken right now. Maybe we could meet next Thursday night after 11:30pm?”
Pretty much. As someone who has dated 3-4 women I’ve met through personal ads (theirs), I can say that your friend’s experience is not unique. All those women said they contacted me specifically because I was one of the few men who seemed normal. From this I deduced that it is always wise to follow one’s instincts in these situations. There is a group of people out there who mine the personals ad “scene,” and most are freaks, criminals, liars, or all three. They meet people this way because it’s a hell of a lot easier than actually being normal.
I highly doubt that what those guys told your friend about themselves is true, even in part.
Maybe it’s been awhile since I’ve been single, but has it gotten a lot harder for a woman to find a suitable man to have meaningless sex with? It boggles my mind.
This falls under the same reasoning that you should go ahead and apply for a job, even though you don’t have all the qualifications required. People think that the ad is just looking for a best-case scenario, and if you’re short a couple details, maybe you’ll make up for it in other ways.
In the case of personal ads, for guys who respond to ads, they probably feel that money & sexual prowess make up for just about any shortcoming.
I guess I should note that the two guys who made it into my highlight film were not in the (unspoken) 4th category: Crazy Nutcases. I am perplexed because it seems as though they thought they were writing a really kick-ass response.
She is a very quirky individual and definitely not mainstream, which is why she wrote an extensive and detailed ad. It’s just really odd to me that my friend mentions loving to dance on the playa with sunshine on her face and love beneath her feet and some egghead thinks a way to reel her in is by telling her that he used to drive sports cars.
Ahem. One more thing. I’m just going to hi-jack myself for a moment…
I just want to be clear that I’m not dissing personal ads at all. I met my husband through an on-line personal ad (his), and I know a lot of people who use this as their primary source of dating. The experiences that I know of have been primarily positive with really low occurrences of people completely misrespresenting themselves. I think you obviously need to be really careful in going about it, but it honestly has surprised me how many quality folks date this way.
Charges a flat monthly fee, and you can send all you want.
Charges by the message, usually you buy ‘X’ number of messages in advance.
#1’s seem to be bigger, but #2’s seem to have the better quality of people in my experience. A girl is going to get shotgun canned responses in #1 no matter what (BTW<it is rare for guys to get messages from women, they hold all the cards.)
It is apparent that many guys find or feel that their MBA, when prominently displayed in their handle or mentioned somewhere, makes them much more attractive. Maybe it does.
I made a personal ad once. I was VERY specific about the kinds of guy that I was looking for. Almost every one of the guys that responded ignored what I said completely. Way too old, wrong religion (any), wanted kids, smoker/drinker, described themselves as athletic (I specifically stated I wasn’t into atheletic guys or sports…)
So out of probably 300 total responses over two or three weeks, maybe a dozen of them were #1s. The rest were all 2s and 3s.
Now that I think about it, my frame of reference (positive experiences) is probably more the woman answering a guy’s ad, not the woman placing the ad. And, yeah, back when I was in the game, I recall sifting through quite a few ads before coming across one that I would consider answering. And now that I’m going down memory lane, I have to giggle at what Lizard said because I remember answering my husband’s ad and saying something to the effect of “I’m responding because you seem normal.”
I guess I would say that I think there are a lot of cool, normal people who use this method but after reflection concede that you have to do some serious searching through the undesirables.
Great post, Igloo - those responses you got are hilarious.
But the topic is interesting, because I have tried answering on-line personals from women in the past, and very rarely did I ever get a reply. I’m pretty sure my response was in the “normal” category, and I certainly didn’t make any of the egregious errors pointed out in this thread. And a lot of my “normal” friends have said the same thing. I just figured the women were getting so many good responses that they couldn’t reply to all of them. If most of the reponses are really as bad as you’re saying they are, I’m really puzzled as to why it would be so hard for a so-called “normal” guy to get answered.
Sometimes the apparent disconnect between all the “nice girls” who can’t find a “nice guy” and nice guys who can’t find a nice girl amazes me. Could it be that none of us is really being honest about what we want? I don’t know. It’s kind of baffling.
To be fair to some of the users out there, the search engines on these sites lack a whole bunch of hunka-hunka, burnin’ accuracy. Type in a request to see only single Pagan users who don’t want kids, and you may end up with John Ashcroft-types who are married and want a dozen lil’ home fries.
True, those who contacted you should have read through your preferences once they selected you, but they may have been somewhat mislead.
Me, I never bothered with dating sites. I just trolled the SDMB until I found a hottie.
Nah, that’s normal. To meet the 3-4 women I mentioned, I must’ve written 20 or more lengthy, detailed responses to ads. It didn’t bother me; I compared it to the ratio of women who accepted when I asked them out in person, and it was about the same. I also like writing, so I didn’t feel it was a chore. Besides, I had an edge on guys who might’ve been more desirable than me in some way, but couldn’t write as well. (Which turned out to be a significant edge indeed. It’s amazing how few competent writers there are out there.)
