Wow Yumanite how nice of you to have remembered.
I have actually been back for a while. Basically, I was all in a panic because I was returning to school (at the archaic age of 35) and was positive that in order to be a student I had to forego my beloved SDMB.
That was a bunch of crap.
Not only can I dope, but I can also crochet and watch Trading Spaces.
Stoid…I was being completely sarcastic.
Go check out Match.com, which allows a person posting an ad to specify the income level of the people in whom they might be interested. You would be surprised (or, more properly, disgusted) at how many women state right up front that they won’t date men who make less than, say $150,000, or $200,000, or whatever their number (or should I say price?) is.
Blowero, it’s a conundrum. As much as I’m saying…wow! this shit is horrifying…to think! some guy writes a response talking about his sports cars, being some kind of entity who has patients, etc., there are probably women out there (I think this is what Stoid may have been getting at), who foam at the mouth for that stuff. I dunno.
Yeah, but can you do it all at the same time?
Well, Igloo, maybe your friend can console herself with this site I found a while back:
It’s got some amusing personal ad responses that I found funny back when I was doing the online dating thing myself. My SO and I met online and now we’re happily living in sin together and plan to do so indefinitely–so it does work sometimes! 
I’ve done the internet dating thing for a while, and I love hearing stories about all the weirdos that women wind up with. My guess is that the really desperate and weird guys send out hundreds of responses hoping to get a nibble, so you ladies tend to get lots of strange responses. Since the guys tend to be the initiators, us normal ones can pick and choose who we contact, so we don’t get quite the number of oddballs.
It can be a bit discouraging when letter after letter seem to go right in a black hole, but women do respond to decent guys, eventually. Girls, what do you prefer, a quick note saying that a fella is interested (and inquiring about your level of interest), or a long dissertation about how he’s just so wonderful?
Way Too Personal is a lot of fun. I moderate a forum that is affiliated with that site. Good folks:)
I can see where income is a pertainent requirement for some women (certainly not everyone). If your goal in life is to be a housewife and mother and live in the suburbs and drive a minivan and not have to pinch pennies to do so - you aren’t looking to marry the starving artist type - even if he has other great qualities. If you yourself make $100,000, you may not want to position yourself as your significant others sugar momma. I have more respect for a woman who recognizes that what she wants is a guy who is going to support her and goes after it, than one who marries someone who fits the starving artist description and then spends her life complaining about how she lacks the material things in life
I know a bar in the Twin Cities (well, I’ve been married ten years, I used to know a bar in the Twin Cities) where the most successful pickup line began “when I was in law school…”
If dropping “hints” in your letter about your car or your profession hooks you up with a like minded babe - that’s good, isn’t it? I mean, Igloo’s friend doesn’t want anyone that shallow - and they probably don’t want anyone as interesting and quirky as Igloo’s friend. Its the mating call of a like species. (The male warbles “BMW, BMW, MBA, MBA”, answered with the female song of “Look at the adorable Coach purse I picked up! It will match those Gucci loafers I bought last week!”). We don’t necessarily want interspecies breeding or anything.
Maybe I’m too honest, but several years ago I tried reading those things on-line and in the paper and I found that in more than a month of paying attention to them, I did not stack up to what one single woman was looking for.
Thank god my wife doesn’t expect me to be “nice,” “good looking,” or have “money” or I’d still be single.
Well, I met my husband from a personal ad (mine) in a local newspaper. Also had a good time reading off multiple inane responses with my sister and girlfriends.
About the “normal” thing…when I first did this, the respondents had to write a letter. (Dark ages.) I got around 15 responses. Later, I put another ad in the same journal when they had the voice mail reply system, and I got around 80 responses, for a similar ad.
Now, sorting through 15 written responses is pretty easy. But 80 phone messages? So, I gotta tell you, normal is good but it’s not enough. I got around 30 messages that said, in full, “I liked your ad. Call me at xxx-xxxx.” OK, it’s normal, but how do I weed through 30 of those? They’re TOO normal, so they get tossed.
The winner wrote a letter that was brief, sincere, and, yes, normal. Bonus for mentioning that he wasn’t into sports, as I am no sports fan and had been bored to death dating one sports-obsessed guy after another. He also mentioned a few interesting details about himself, which made me wish to know him better.
See? Not a crazy “I’m-the-best-you’ll-ever-see” sales pitch, not a boring “I’m here call me” response, just short, sweet, and honest. (Except for that inch that he padded his height in the letter, which I forgave.)
PS- the worst responses start with “I’m writing this from my cell.” Be warned.
I don’t think that’s necessarily because they’re ‘normal’ per se, but because those Voice Reply systems charge you 1.99 or whatever per minute to leave a message. It’s much, much cheaper to just leave a quick ‘contact me’ message to what may be dozens of different ads, and have the ad placers respond to it on their cost (cheapest, of course, is what I do, which is avoid Voice Reply systems altogether…)
Oh, they exist, and there are many of them. An acquaintance of mine decided awhile back that she was sick of dating guys “with no money” and put out a personal ad requesting a rich fellow.
She wound up with some New York businessman who flies down on weekends…he’s put her up in a pricey condo, bought her a car, and gives her spending money, all for the privelege of having sex with her and showing her off like a trophy around town. His wife and kids back in New York evidently are unaware.
I’d call her greedy, disgusting, and utterly immoral. But she’s a social acquaintance I see often. So I won’t call her that.
Well she’ll get her come-uppance when her looks go and she ends up high & dry.
Reminds me of a cartoon I saw the other day. The caption read “Effects of wallet-enhancement surgery”, and it showed two women ogling a guy’s back pocket, saying “Do you think that’s natural?”
** Igloo, ** I wasn’t sure.
But in fact, it does count with lots of women. Of course, these women tend to have really pathetic value systems, but they end up hooking up with men who have similar value systems. So everybody’s happy. I guess.
Ahem. A couple years ago a male friend of mine got badgered into creating a yahoo personals ad. He didn’t really want to do the internet personals thing he only went ahead with it to get another friend of ours to shut up. The ad he created was titled “raging_boner”, featured a picture of him sitting on the toliet reading the newspaper and included by far the most mysogynonistic personal description ever posted to a dating site. Some of the lovely phrases used included “If you’re a good girl I’ll let you come over and suck me off while I play video games and then clean my room before you go” and “Only reply if you think you can handle my three inches of fury!” Meant as a total joke. Word gets out about his ad and all of us laugh it up for a while. I get it in my head that it would be funny to create an ad for the type of woman who would actually reply to his ad. I wrote up the most delusional, insecure and derranged ad I could think of and found a picture online of a girl who had just, well ahh, recieved a facial, all of which somehow made it past Yahoo’s censors. I replied to his ad, hilarity ensued as we traded emails for a day or two before he figured it out and then dropped it. Well I left the ad active for a few days after I was done screwing with my friend before getting bored one day and checking to see if “she” had gotten in replies. Her inbox had been filled to capacity in 48 hours.
Wow, what a freak show of replies. I went out of my way to laden my creation with enough emotional baggage that dating her would require a team of sherpas to carry it all, self esteem issues, raving luancy etc… Anyway I was so shocked and amused by the quantity and type of replies she got that I went ahead and created a special website just to archive them If you want to see delusional and offensive replies to a personal ad, this is where to find them. Oh yes, this was done back when Yahoo personals was a completely free service.
Dude, on your website the link to the personal ad you created is broken.
Yea I know the link to the actual ads on yahoo died a while ago and I failed to archive the orignal ads 
At the time I first threw that page together I didn’t anticipate it being so popular, it was originally intended just for my friends to see the exchange between me and Charlie. If I wasn’t such a lazy webmaster I’d do something about it.
So, you guys are saying that if I make a personal ad that says,
“Vaguely insane virologist looking for someone more sane than he is for generally amusing times”
I’d get some responces?
Whoohoo!
CRorex: Dude, If I saw a personal ad from a chick like that, I would be all OVER her! Of course, if you’re picky about the sanity of your potential mates…