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If you think that there is not big buck in even the free dating sites, take a look at the following article about PlentyofFish and its founder Markus Frind. PlentyofFish just sold for an obscene amount of money. Congrats to Markus!
PS I’m not a fan of Plentyoffish. I am a firm believer in “You get what you pay for,” and free sets the bar pretty darned low. However, if you resist paying on the sites that charge and get a free ride on those who do pay up (about 12 to 1, unpaid to paid), give us all a break and go on over to Plentyoffish where you can openly hook up for free.
January 13, 2008
MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.
For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.
There’s much to be admired in Mr. Frind’s entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.
Mr. Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site first became popular among English-speaking Canadians. Popularity among online daters in many United States cities followed more recently, and with minimal spending on advertising the site. According to data from comScore Media Metrix for November 2007, Plenty of Fish had 1.4 million unique visitors in the United States. In December, Mr. Frind said, the site served up 1.2 billion page views, and page views have soared 20 percent since Dec. 26.
Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a “trivial” issue that did not bother users.
A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive. Somehow, the site instantly replenishes the lost customers and attracts many more to boot.
No one heads to Plenty of Fish for the customer service, which is all but nonexistent. The company does not need a support structure to handle members’ subscription and billing issues because the service is entirely advertising-based. Its tagline is: “100 percent free. Put away your credit card.” For hand-holding, users must rely on fellow members, whose advice is found in online forums. The Dating & Love Advice category lists more than 320,000 posts, making up in sheer quantity what it lacks in a soothing live presence available by phone.
The principal customer service that Plenty of Fish provides is responses to complaints about possibly fraudulent identities and to subpoenas and search-warrant requests. Last year, Mr. Frind hired his first, and still only, employee to handle these requests, freeing him to attend to adding new servers when required and tweaking code. “Most of the time, I don’t need to do anything,” he said.
To keep his site’s forums free of spam, Mr. Frind has refined a formula for analyzing customer feedback and arriving at a determination of whether a given forum post is spam and should automatically be deleted. He has also devised some new software twists that enable him to offload work to his customers, letting users review the photos that are uploaded to the site.
Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity. The work would be costly if Mr. Frind relied on a paid staff to do it.
Fortunately for him, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of humans eager to look at pictures of other humans, and Mr. Frind taps his customers to carry out the reviewing, gratis. Some have made it their principal pastime. Among Plenty of Fish’s volunteers were 120 who last year evaluated more than 100,000 images each. He explains his volunteers’ enthusiasm for the work as an expression of gratitude: “Lots of people feel like they want to give back to the site because it’s free.”
Plenty of Fish displays banner ads, Google-supplied ads and, most profitable of all, “affiliate” marketing links that send users to other dating sites. For example, Mr. Frind said, when one of his customers clicks on an advertisement for a book titled “Double Your Dating” and, after being sent to the publisher’s Web site, ends up buying it for $40, the publisher pays Plenty of Fish a commission — of $40 — for the sale, glad to have landed a customer that past experience shows is a good prospect for “upselling” other goods and services related to dating.
For all that Mr. Frind has accomplished, his site looks puny when compared with Craigslist, which has built a mighty automation engine tended by only a handful of people. Craigslist’s personals draw about six million unique visitors a month, more than any other dating site, and its listings for all categories generate 10 billion page views a month. It covers 450 localities in 50 countries around the world — with only 25 employees. It is among the top 10 busiest English-language sites, but the customers who enjoy its free listings, like Plenty of Fish’s, must serve themselves or seek assistance from others. “Anything that represents customer hand-holding represents a failure of site design,” said Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive. “We try to make changes to the site to make the problem go away.”
BOTH Plenty of Fish and Craigslist have created sites that run almost completely on their own, but in different ways. Craigslist has no commercial messages other than listings, and it collects fees only for a minuscule slice of its posts. It charges employers for jobs listings in 10 of its 450 cities, and brokers for apartment listings in New York City. All other listings are free. “To most of our users,” Mr. Buckmaster said, “it’s a mystery how we make money.”
At Plenty of Fish, there is no mystery: a large square of advertising sits in the middle of most profile pages. Its success demonstrates that many consumers will tolerate, and even embrace, advertising when a site offers a free service for which others charge membership fees.
Mr. Frind has found that rare business in which the profits gush in, whether or not he leaves his hammock.
I picked up a copy of “The Economist” in February, probably the first time ever. And what should I see but my very own logo (a chocolate dipped strawberry) as the back drop of a fascinating graph. Not only did I just have to post it here, so y’all could know this trivia, but also, Sweetie Pie Drew used it in his Valentine’s Day lecture to his botany class.
Valentine’s Day Food of love
Feb 14th 2008
From Economist.com
ON VALENTINE’S DAY the relationship between chocolate and sex becomes, at least for gentlemen considering the ideal gift, less a matter of theoretical musing and one of stark practicality. Will a box of chocolates do the trick? In some parts of Europe sex and chocolate go hand in hand, though a causal link is unclear. Mediterranean lovers tend to have as much sex but less chocolate—perhaps hotter weather has a bearing on both. The Japanese have precious little of either.
Okay, this is a very long reprint, and I apologize in advance, but I thought that this article which appeared in a recent “Atlantic” was too good not to put here in it’s entirety. A dilemma that I hear all to often is from women who fret about “settling,” staying with the less-than-perfect guy rather than continuing their search for the ideal. Here’s a long and thoughtful piece from the other side. Author Lori Gottlieb went ahead and had her baby, since Mr. Perfect had not shown up. Here what she is thinking now:
The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough
by Lori Gottlieb
Marry Him!
About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.
“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.
Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.
Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there’s supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn’t feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it’s unlikely.
And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)
When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.
What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.
I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.
The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?
It’s not that I’ve become jaded to the point that I don’t believe in, or even crave, romantic connection. It’s that my understanding of it has changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long- married couples are having much sex anyway?
“I just want someone who’s willing to be in the trenches with me,” my single friend Jennifer told me, “and I never thought of marriage that way before.” Two of Jennifer’s friends married men who Jennifer believes aren’t even straight, and while Jennifer wouldn’t have made that choice a few years back, she wonders whether she might be capable of it in the future. “Maybe they understood something that I didn’t,” she said.
What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5’4” and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail:
I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).
She wasn’t joking.
A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.
All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where’s the cutoff? Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?
Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of major depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists.” He’d never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome, and smart. As I looked at him from across the table, I thought, Yeah, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that. But my very next thought was, Maybe I can settle for better. It’s like musical chairs—when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?
Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, I did, although I never articulated this, have certain requirements. I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.
Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me. What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. But when I chose to have a baby on my own, the plan was that I would continue to search for true connection afterward; it certainly wasn’t that I would have a baby alone only to settle later. After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?
Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something objectionable about making the case for settling, because it’s based on the premise that women’s biological clocks place them at the mercy of men, and that therefore a power dynamic dictates what should be an affair solely of the heart (not the heart and the ovaries). But I’m not the only woman who accepts settling as a valid choice—apparently so do the millions who buy bestselling relationship books that advocate settling but that, so as not to offend, simply spin the concept as a form of female empowerment.
Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)
The approaches in these books may differ, but the message is the same: more important than love is marriage. To achieve that goal, women across the country are poring over guidebooks that all boil down to determining, “Does he like me?,” while completely overlooking the equally essential question, “Do I like him?” In other words, whatever compromises you have to make—including, but not limited to, pretending to be or actually becoming an entirely different person—make sure that you get some schmo to propose to you before you turn into a spinster.
Last year’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women makes the most blatant case for settling: if women were more willing to “think outside the box,” as one of the book’s married sources advises, many of them would be married. The author then trots out tales of professional, accomplished women happily dating a plumber, a park ranger, and an Army helicopter nurse. The moral is supposed to be “Don’t be too picky” but many of the anecdotes quote women who seem to be trying to convince not just the reader, but themselves, that they haven’t settled.
“I should be with some guy with a vast vocabulary who is very smart,” said Heather, a 30-year-old lawyer turned journalist. Instead, she’s dating an actor who didn’t finish college. “My boyfriend is fun, he’s smart, but he hasn’t gone through years of school. He wanted to pursue acting. And you can tell—he doesn’t have that background, and it never ever once bothered me. But for everyone else, [his lack of education] is what they see.” Another woman says she dates “the ‘secrets’ … guys other women don’t recognize as great.” How’s that for damning praise?
Meanwhile, in sugarcoating this message, the authors often resort to flattery, telling the reader to remember how fabulous, attractive, charming, and intelligent she is, in the hopes that she’ll project a more confident vibe on dates. In my case, though, the flattery backfired. I read these books thinking, Wait, if I’m such a great catch, why should I settle for anyone less than my equal? If I’m so fabulous, don’t I deserve true romantic connection?
Only one popular book that I can think of in the vast “find a man” genre (like most single women confounded by their singleness, I’m embarrassingly well versed) takes the opposite approach. In He’s Just Not That Into You, written by the happily married Greg Behrendt and the unhappily single Liz Tuccillo, the duo exhorts women not to settle. But the book’s format is telling: Behrendt gives perky pep talks to women unable to find a worthy match, while Tuccillo repeatedly comments on how hard it is to take her co-author’s advice, because while being with a partner who is “beneath you” (Behrendt’s term) is problematic, being single just plain “sucks” (Tuccillo’s term).
Before I got pregnant, though, I also read single-mom books such as Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide, whose chapter titles “Can I Afford It?” and “Dealing With the Stress” seemed like realistic antidotes to the faux-empowering man-hunting manual headings like “A Little Lingerie Can Go a Long Way.” But the book’s author, Mikki Morrissette, held out a tantalizing carrot. In her introduction, she describes having a daughter on her own; then, she writes, a few years later and five months pregnant with her son, “I met a guy I fell in love with. He and my daughter were in the delivery room when my son was born in January 2004.” Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all—a baby now, my soul mate later!”
Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.
Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man—much less The One—is going to knock on your door and join that party.
They also gloss over the cost of dating as a single mom: the time and money spent on online dating (because there are no single men at toddler birthday parties); the babysitter tab for all those boring blind dates; and, most frustrating, hours spent away from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”
Try bringing a guy home to that.
Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.
My friend Alan, for instance, justified his choice of a “bland” wife who’s a good mom but with whom he shares little connection this way: “I think one-stop shopping is overrated. I get passion at my office with my work, or with my friends that I sometimes call or chat with—it’s not the same, and, boy, it would be exciting to have it with my spouse. But I spend more time with people at my office than I do with my spouse.”
Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.
“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”
Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be the true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it,” there’s none of the ambivalence a woman with a deadline feels. “Women are the least romantic,” Gabe said. “They think, ‘I can do that.’ For a lot of women, it becomes less about love and more about what they can live with.”
Not long ago, Gabe, who is 43, dated a woman he liked very much one-on-one, but he broke up with her because “she couldn’t be haimish”—comfortable—with his friends in a group setting. He has no regrets. A female friend who broke up with a guy because he “didn’t like to read” and who is now, too, a single mom (with, ironically, no time to read herself) similarly felt no regrets—at first. At the time, she couldn’t imagine settling, but here’s the Catch-22: “If I’d settled at 39,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”
The paradox, of course, is that the more it behooves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to settle; a woman in her mid- to late 30s is more discriminating than one in her 20s. She has friends who have known her since childhood, friends who will know her more intimately and understand her more viscerally than any man she meets in midlife. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move downtown, but I love my home at the beach,” and, “But he’s just not curious,” and “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”
I’ve been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it’s the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we’d choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever.That’s not a whole lot of choice.
Remember the movie Broadcast News? Holly Hunter’s dilemma—the choice between passion and friendship—is exactly the one many women over 30 are faced with. In the end, Holly Hunter’s character decides to wait for the right guy, but he (of course) never materializes. Meanwhile, her emotional soul mate, the Albert Brooks character, gets married (of course) and has children.
And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.
My friend Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s like, ‘God, that would be nice.’”
That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing Internet poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching ESPN and calls that “a massage.” The more-pertinent questions, to most concerned mothers of daughters in their 30s, have to do with whether the daughter’s boyfriend will make a good father; or, if he’s a workaholic, whether he can provide the environment for her to be a good mother. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician, “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”
I know all this now, and yet—here’s the problem—much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. It’s not that I have to be dazzled by a guy anymore (though it would be nice). It’s not even that I have to think about him when he’s not around (though that would be nice, too). Nor is it that I’m unable to accept reality and make significant compromises because that’s what grown-ups do (I can and have—I had a baby on my own).
No, the problem is that the very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. It’s no longer a matter, as it was in my early 30s, of “just not feeling it,” of wanting to be in love. Consider the men whom older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; a trying-to-make-it-in-his-40s actor; a widower who has three nightmarish kids and who’s still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer (so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party). It’s not that these women are crazy; it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when we were younger. And while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, now I have my son to consider. It’s one thing to settle for a subpar mate; it’s quite another to settle for a subpar father figure for my child. So while there’s more incentive to settle now, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.
This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods. Admittedly, it’s a dicey case to make because, like the divorced women I know who claim they wouldn’t have done anything differently, because then they wouldn’t have Biff and Buffy, I, too, can’t imagine life without my magical son. (Although, had I had children with a Mr. Good Enough, wouldn’t I be as hopelessly in love with those children, too?) I also acknowledge the power of the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon, and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.
But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”
The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”
Not one person has taken me up on this offer.
Just about anything you want can be found on the net, even love, right? Here’s a resource for singles with a yen to find both love and adventure:
Travel Briefs
Travel dating pairs couples on the road
Single and like meeting people on vacation and business trips? Or simply want to put the downtime spent in the airplane, on layovers and between business meetings to better use? Matchmaking travel agencies can help you connect with like-minded singles who share your flight or itinerary.
TripLife, at http://www.triplife.com, lets you create a personal profile including photo, occupation, favorite sport, alma mater or any appropriate information, enter your travel plans, then instantly see profiles of other people on your flight or already at your destination. You can e-mail invites to prospective golfing partners or dinner companions and remain in the network for later notification whenever you and other TripLife members are in the same city.
Then there’s speed dating aboard a 737. SkyDate, http://www.skydate.eu/v1.0/eu/home/home.php, offers travelers to Europe this opportunity to enjoy brief encounters with several people on an airline flight. Women remain seated, and men make the rounds. Participants are discouraged from asking each other out and instead rate their speed dates by vote. Those who voted to meet each other again are then given contact information.
Other travel dating services include O Solo Mio, http://www.osolomio.com; and MatchTravel, http://www.matchtravel.com.
I love it when I see research results tied directly to the needs of singles. Here’s some out of Great Britain on screen names and their relative appeal. Take note, those of you who have yet to sign up on a dating site: Often the screen name you start with is the one you are stuck with, so put some thought in before you sign up.
Finding true online love lies just in your screen name
London, Apr 4 : It’s all in the name, it seems, if you’re hunting for love on the Internet. A new research has suggested that while dating online, people should take care of what screen name they use, in order to maximize their digital appeal.
According to the study, playful and flirtatious names such as ‘fun2bwith’ or ‘i’msweet’ were ranked top by both men and women daters as those they would most like to contact.
Physical descriptors such as ‘cutie’ or ‘blueeyes’ were close behind.
“These names suggest an outgoing or fun nature, or clarify the user’s positive physical appearance,” Times Online quoted Dr Monica Whitty, a lecturer in cyber-psychology at Nottingham Trent University and co-author of the paper, as saying.
These types of screen names may go some way to making up for the major drawback with Internet dating - not being able to see for sure what people look like.
However she advised female lonely hearts to avoid screen names, which attempt to be classy, or show how clever they are.
According to the study, male daters would less likely to contact screen names such as ‘wellread’ or ‘welleducated’, although the research found that women were more drawn to names that suggested men were cultured.
“Less flirtatious names may be more appealing to women because they are wary of men who might be using the site to find one-night stands rather than long-term relationships,” said Whitty.
Straightforward or plain names such as ‘smith24’ or ‘justme’ were also considered less appealing.
But bottom of the heap for both men and women came names denoting wealth such as ‘wealthyandwise’, ‘lovemyporsche’ or ‘entrepreneur’.
“This was a very surprising finding. We believe wealthy-sounding names fared poorly because showing off about one’s wealth from the outset might reflect a superficial personality or deceit,” said Whitty.
The finding will be presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference in Dublin.
Around Valentine’s Day, Sara Schaefer Munoz posted on a Wall Street Journal blog about high priced matchmaking services. She refers to an article in Financial Times which thank goodness clarified for me that Munoz was writing about introduction services that took both men and women, not like the trend we have seen to match wealthy men with gorgeous young women. I’ve written about those sites before, see here.
Munoz asks for readers’ comments, and she got lots of them! You might want to take a look at the comments yourself. The really interesting part is that practically none of the comments are about high-priced introduction services. Instead, they are about online dating, mostly success on Match.com! Hey, good advertising, huh?
For Busy Professionals Seeking Love, Are Dating Services Helpful?
Posted by Sara Schaefer Munoz
We’ve talked about how busy young professionals have trouble finding the time to focus on dating. According to this recent article in the Financial Times, several elite dating services — modeled on executive head-hunting firms — promise to find you the perfect mate for a price.
One service, the Country Register, charges £10,000, about $20,000, for an 18 month membership in its top tier personal search service, and is currently signing five new city-based clients a month — twice the joining rate for 2000, the piece says. The service spends at least half a day in the client’s home getting to know them and promises that respondents are met and screened in advance.
But why pay a premium when you could meet people at work, or take on inexpensive Internet dating? A former busy professional at Merrill Lynch says in the article that “The last thing I wanted after work was to socialize with bankers or sit down at a computer.” Singletons also say that online dating requires a lot of time to sort through profiles and craft witty responses to potential suitors. (It can take so much effort to present yourself that some are even plagiarizing profiles they find online.)
I’d love to hear from single professionals who are looking for love. What’s your experience with online dating? Where have you met — or looked for — a mate? Would you pay a premium for an elite match-making service?
Four years ago, I lived in a small city where it was hard to meet single, like-minded men. I posted a profile on Match.com and eventually received an expression of interest from a man who lived 90 miles away–someone I would never have met any other way. We e-mailed a few times and then arranged to meet in my city for a drink, which led to dinner…and, about 10 months later, marriage. We now have a 2-year-old son. Online personals don’t work for everyone, but they did for us.
When I met my final “date,” I had already been on Match.com once before. The second time, I posted new and improved photos (of myself) and a rewritten, snappier profile (that I wrote on my own). I resolved to keep the e-mail correspondence to a minimum. I set up in-person meetings as quickly as possible to avoid any fantasy, “virtual” dating, which is easy to fall into when you’re e-mailing someone you’ve never seen before.
For someone who had done everything I could think of to expand my social circle and meet new people in my city, online personals worked better than my other efforts–through which I met some wonderful friends, but no potential boyfriends.
Comment by anonymous - February 19, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I tend to think that the only real advantage that an ultra-premium service could offer is a signal between matched participants that both are monetarily successful. While online surveys are imperfect, I have no reason to believe that a person can’t put up a facade for half a day to present just as ideal an image to a premium service as they do to an online site. To be sure, there is more of an initial guarantee of the validity of the person’s identity and appearance, but if someone online presents a false appearance, that will be found out quickly in the light of a real meeting.
Totally free sites are probably so diluted as to be useless, but lower premium sites do some analysis to attempt basic compatibility and weed out people who are really on the fence about whether or not to put some effort into it; and ultimately, perception of compatibility is a rather imperfect science anyway, so having a range of options is probably a good thing.
I think that unless someone prioritizes financial success above all else, paying $20,000 is not going to produce markedly better results than paying somewhere in the $100-2000 range.
That said, while the traditional approach of meeting people in life is theoretically great, it’s a rather sensitive issue for people in tightly wound social networks; one bad relationship and one’s entire social fabric can become unwound.
Comment by Clinton - February 19, 2008 at 11:25 am
All right, already, I fell for it. Online Booty Call has consistently had such a great sense of humor in its publicity, and here’s the latest entry: An April Fool’s joke. But I bit, and was about to write a blog piece about the OBC owner’s cruising of his own clients for dates and now a mate. (It happens, folks: the new trend with professional matchmakers is to set up dating sites that they they peruse for possible dates for their own matchmaking clients.) So read here, with your tongue firmly in cheek:
Online Dating CEO Marries Customer
Edited by Carly Zander
Tue, 01 Apr 2008, 08:00:10 GMT
SAN DIEGO, Calif., April 1 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE)—In a stunningly ironic twist, OnlineBootyCall.com Founder and CEO has married one of his own customers. In a private Vegas wedding, Moses (Mo) Brown married Heather Rivers (Username: WantNLovN), a 24-year-old fashion designer from New York. Online Booty Call is a unit of Mobeze, Inc.
Caption: OnlineBootyCall CEO Moses Brown married website member Heather Rivers in a private Vegas WeddingOn a traditional dating site like eHarmony(R), such an event would be championed as a testament to the community’s romantic strength. Yet, at Online Booty Call (OBC), it has quite the opposite effect. Members of OBC actually enjoy being single and believe the adventure of dating doesn’t have to be based on the pretense of long-term commitment. So the idea of the CEO attending to the domestics of married life will have a chilling impact on this community of Next Gen daters. It’s all very reminiscent of Hugh Hefner’s similar marriage attempt in 1989.
Brown, with a sparkle in his eye, describes the beginning of their newfound eternal love, “So there I was thinking, man for sure this profile is fake, she’s the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen. But, after some investigation, and a bit of ‘Google stalking,’ I discovered she was the real deal. It’s awesome; I’m ready to cash in all my chips, and leave it all behind for our life together as one!”
OBC employees worry Brown will make good on his plan to “change the name of the site and gear it towards a guaranteed marriage service… because my wife and I want everyone to be as happy as we are.” In response, a senior programmer responded, “Hell, his ship is going down and the fool didn’t even get a prenup!”
We’re predicting a widespread “WTF… Married, seriously?” response from OBC members. As the man who created the “patented” Booty Call Commandments (second commandment “Thou shouldest never ask: can we see each other from now on?") will be ending his Playboy lifestyle, literally, as Brown does party at the Mansion.
About Online Booty Call
OnlineBootyCall.com is an online dating community for singles who enjoy being single. The site’s lighthearted approach to dating allows its members to combine all the benefits of dating with the excitement of maintaining the single life. With millions of registered members throughout the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, OBC makes millions of personal connections every week. OBC is an interactive and fun dating site where “you don’t have to promise marriage just to get a date!”
When clients ask me about the best dating sites, I always list Match.com at the top. How could I not, when I met my Sweetie Drew there almost exactly ten years ago right now? I love it that Match.com has stayed at the top (or nearly so) of the thousands of dating sites that have cropped up. And I particularly like the new look Match started a year or two ago—a classy black and white, with style and pizazz. My impression is that Match is trying and succeeding in attracting a bit of a higher cut of singles. See this piece below which validates what I have been thinking:
What The Heck is Going at At Match.com?
Posted: 03 Mar 2008 02:41 PM CST
Recently, I have been on several great dates and been deluged with emails and winks from some very cool women on Match.com. Did someone at Match optimize a database differently, tweak the search page, or are they spending more ad dollars in different ways?
Whatever the reason, I am seriously impressed with the people Match is attracting these days. Obviously there are a number of factors, some of which I can control, others not so much.
The usual post V-day signup splurge is in full effect, I’ve got some new photos and, hello Match, every single woman that emails me says my little mini-blog post that I updated at the top of my profile is a big reason they contacted me. They know I’m active and taking the time to do something different to put myself out there and differentiate myself from the rest of the single dudes.
I only belong to about 10 dating sites now, down from a peak of 25+ a few years ago. I’m not seeing anywhere near this amount of activity on any other site except for OKCupid. Singlesnet sends out a lot of emails but they are so spammy and unauthentic that I don’t even bother replying anymore.
To give eHarmony credit, I have gotten matched several times recently, but I’m not a member right now so into the trash bin they go. They really need to do a better job enticing me into being a member again, their re-marketing messaging is not doing the job.
I feel like I need to put up a giant disclaimer when I write about my personal experience with dating sites. I talk about dating site clients, I trash sites that obviously are just in it for the money and doing a crap job of it, and after 6 years in this business I am admittedly jaded, but not pessimistic (there is a difference), about online dating.
That said, it feels really good to experience this uptick in activity. Here’s to all dating sites working harder to make this experience the rule, not the exception.
Who says that all you meet on line is a bunch of clowns? Here’s a real clown and his bride who met on Jdate.com and whose wedding made the 4/13 New York Times “Vows” write up. Now the REALLY interesting part is that this is the second wedding in a month that the NYT has featured couples who met on the Net. Both have little videos accompanying write ups on the net. Here’s the one about Stephanie and Adam, and here’s the link to the video about Diane and Philip. I think that both couples met on Jdate, so if you are looking for a Jewish partner, clown or no clown, Jdate seems to be hopping.
April 13, 2008
Vows
Stephanie Schwab and Adam Gertsacov
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
MIDGE and Madge were not invited to the wedding in Yonkers on April 5. Stephanie Schwab, the bride, claimed to be jealous of those extraordinarily petite showgirls who had traveled the globe with her betrothed.
“He coos at them, and speaks to them in very, very soft tones,” she said.
So Adam Gertsacov, 43, agreed to leave his famous fleas at home, along with his velvet top hat and red-white-and-green shoes. His clown nose was allowed only for prewedding photos, but Ms. Schwab joyfully wore one, too. They succeeded admirably in maneuvering into an ardent kiss beneath the bright red snouts.
Marrying a clown is no run-of-the-mill thing. Mr. Gertsacov is the owner of the Acme Miniature Flea Circus. His stars, Midge and Madge, each dwarfed by the period at the end of this sentence, are said to perform feats like pulling chariots or walking a high wire.
Audiences pretty much have to take Mr. Gertsacov’s word for all this. He uses a magnifying glass to provide the play-by-play, and only the props are visible. So how did Ms. Schwab, 40, a brainy vice president of Converseon, a marketing agency in Manhattan, someone who holds an M.B.A. from the University of Illinois, end up marrying a graduate of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College who sometimes performs as a giant bumblebee?
Blame the Internet. In 2004, each was prowling a dating site. Mr. Gertsacov, of Rhode Island, traveled continuously and was open to meeting somebody nice from anywhere. Ms. Schwab, of New York, emphatically did not want another long-distance relationship.
And then there were the photos Mr. Gertsacov displayed of himself. One was a graphic blowup of an eye. She wondered if the possible artiness outweighed the obvious goofiness.
She consented to a phone call, and soon they were having “these wonderful conversations late into the night.” Over coffee in New York they “instantly connected,” she said. Soon, he was in New York almost every weekend.
He handled the inevitable career questions gradually. He first said he was a performing artist; then a creator of original comic shows; and, finally, someone who presented “popular theatrical traditions.” Only when she seemed “firmly on the hook,” he said, did he disclose the flea-bitten fabric of those heralded traditions.
She liked his intelligence and creativity, and his apparent ability to profit from his passions. “He wasn’t a lawyer, he wasn’t a consultant; it was refreshing,” she said.
Vaudeville, she thought, was exactly the kind of thing her parents would get a kick out of. And at the wedding, her father, Steven Schwab of Chicago, an owner of a business there that makes baking products for children, exuded, “There will be humor in their life forever.”
Mr. Gertsacov said: “I think she may have presented herself as more bohemian than she actually is. Which is O.K. I’m bohemian enough for both of us.”
Ms. Schwab, who had two previous marriages, once used $120,000 of her own money to start a company called Erotigo, to bring pornography to hand-held computers. It was featured in BusinessWeek, but after Sept. 11 she failed to attract the investors she needed. “It was a wild ride, really fun,” she said.
Mr. Gertsacov, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and earned a master’s in theater and communications from Rhode Island College, claims he is the most educated clown in America — “barring certain elected officials.”
They bought a house in Yonkers two and a half years ago, became active in a synagogue and began to talk around the topic of marriage. Talk became plans five months ago, when Ms. Schwab became pregnant. Mr. Gertsacov’s mother, Karel, was unconscious and near death last December when he told her that he was engaged. “Her eyes fluttered,” he said, adding that her death soon afterward contributed to him wanting a sense of familial continuity.
The magic came together at the Roosevelt Ballroom in Yonkers, a classically inspired hall visited by both Presidents Roosevelt. The wedding invitation — in orange, a color with which Mr. Gertsacov is obsessed — announced the occasion as “A colossal combination that is sure to amaze & delight for generations to come.”
The bride was radiant in a gown that had been twice altered to meet the exigencies of pregnancy. The bridegroom only once upstaged their rabbi, Jason Nevarez. Mr. Gertsacov could not help himself from doing an elaborate pantomime with his prayer shawl. Wedding rings were extracted from a Cracker Jack box.
At the reception guests shared their talents, from juggling to rope tricks to what seemed deliberately lame humor. There was a life-size dog puppet who scratched the audience’s fancy with bon mots about fleas.
Then, as a klezmer combo shifted into high, the couple glided across the shimmering dance floor. A singer crooned the lovely, inevitable lyrics of Cole Porter:
“Birds do it, bees do it,
Even educated fleas do it.
Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”
The previous blog posting here about stealing profiles got me to do a little sleuthing around to find out who Hugh Gallagher, the author of the most copied essay, really is. This essay got Hugh into NYU, Wikipedia, won him Scholastic Press, Inc.’s national writing contest in 1990, and started him on a career as a humorist. All from a college application. See this masterpiece below, in its entirety. But PS, don’t copy it!
Hugh Gallagher’s ‘College Essay’
3A. ESSAY: IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:
ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
Dear Amy: I am a single female in my 30s. I am not into the bar scene, so I use Internet sites to meet and date men.
If I like a man’s profile, I write to him. Upon their reply, men immediately give me their phone numbers and ask me to call them.
I made the first move by writing them, so I believe they should take over the pursuing role.
I will call them after I get to know them a bit, but not at the beginning. Am I too old-fashioned? Has society switched roles on me? Or have women before me been so rude that these men are gun-shy?
- Susan in Chicago
Dear Susan: A protocol of sorts has emerged for Internet meeting and matching in which men offer their phone numbers, giving women the opportunity to call.
Men who do this aren’t necessarily expecting you to pursue them. They are acknowledging that women are sometimes reluctant to give out their phone numbers for security reasons. A guy who does this is telling you that he is interested and would like to hear from you.
It seems a little cockeyed that you would be willing to post and respond to online profiles and yet expect a guy to “pursue” you. Men exclusively pursuing women is a relationship relic. The Internet is a great social leveler, so many of the old rules don’t apply.
If you are uncomfortable “cold-calling” a man - many people don’t like speaking by phone if they don’t know the person on the other end - you can ignore the proffered phone number and conduct the “getting to know you” phase by e-mail.
Way back in 2002 when I first became a Romance Coach, the first thing I perfected was my Platinum Profile Workup and Rehab. Since I had read plenty of profiles in my own search for love, and rewritten my own in the process several times, I figured I knew what I was talking about. I discovered I had a real talent for capturing the essence of a person in a few short paragraphs, and a business was born!
Given how easy it is to copy and paste just about anything you find on the net, it’s no surprise that singles would set about copying chunks and even whole profiles from a complete stranger. For all I know, any of the thousands I have written for my clients have been copied and used too. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I would have to be quite complimented.
Frankly, it’s rather standard advice to peruse the profiles of others to find ideas about what to write in one’s own profile essay. But you’d better be prepared to back up what you write, because people will notice.
I urge folks to be absolutely truthful in their profiles, using their real ages, current photos, etc. If/when your date discovers a lie, you’ve got a problem. Plagiarizing a profile essay would count as a lie, especially if you aren’t what you wrote. As the article below so correctly points out in the title, copying what someone else has written shows at the least a lack of a “moral compass.”
The Cut-and-Paste Personality
Lacking inspiration and a moral compass, some online daters
are borrowing other people’s witty Web profiles.
By JENNIFER SARANOW
February 15, 2008; Page W1
These identity thieves don’t want your money. They want your quirky sense of humor and your cool taste in music.
Among the 125 million people in the U.S. who visit online dating and social-networking sites are a growing number of dullards who steal personal profiles, life philosophies, even signature poems. “Dude u like copied my whole myspace,” posts one aggrieved victim.
Hugh Gallagher, a 36-year-old writer in New York, is one of the copied. Match.com1 has more than 50 profiles with parts of Mr. Gallagher’s college entrance essay, which he penned nearly two decades ago and later appeared in Harper’s Magazine. “I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees” and “I write award-winning operas” are among Mr. Gallagher’s most popular lines.
They worked well enough for Jim Carey, a 38-year-old pharmaceutical salesman in Bothell, Wash. He says he wanted women to know he was funny but was too lazy to think up anything. So he copied Mr. Gallagher’s essay for his online profile. A year ago, he arranged to meet a woman for drinks. She asked about his operas. He confessed. “I felt like a balloon deflating,” he says.
Original souls who discover they have been replicated say it’s unethical and creepy. “I came across a guy who completely STOLE my profile message,” posts one woman in Michigan. “I mean he had to have copied and pasted the whole thing and then just changed gender specific things to fit his own!!”
Online daters feel pressure to stand out and believe they must sell themselves like a product, say researchers at Georgetown, Rutgers and Michigan State universities who are conducting a joint study of them. “You are not making money off of somebody else’s work; you’re just trying to market yourself,” says self-confessed copier Jeff Picazio, a 40-year-old computer-systems manager in Boynton Beach, Fla. After hunting for some copy-and-paste help—including borrowing the line “you will soon learn that I’m a raging egomaniac”—Mr. Picazio says he’s gotten 20 dates.
Hugh Gallagher’s college admission essay has become one of the most-copied documents in the online dating scene. WSJ’s Jennifer Saranow speaks to Mr. Gallagher about the use of his essay.
A search on MySpace.com2 brought up more than 700 recent comments that accuse others of stealing headlines, user names, songs, background designs and entire profiles. In a recent survey of more than 400 online daters commissioned by Engage.com3, 9% of respondents said they copied from another person’s profile; 15% suspect their own words were stolen.
A Match.com profile of a man in Redmond, Wash., includes this postscript: “Shame on the woman who plagiarized my narrative and stole it for her profile!” And a 34-year-old woman in Basking Ridge, N.J., tacked this P.S. to her Plentyoffish.com4 profile: “To the girl who copied my profile—and denies it...you s-!”
The quest for originality has spawned the services of online-dating coaches and profile writers. Some of them are victims, too. Dave Mizrachi, 34, of Miami sells an “Insider Internet Dating” course for $97. Mr. Mizrachi includes his own dating profile, advising men to use it as a guide. But at least 25 people on Match.com have stolen his lines, including: “I get a lot of women emailing me, (which is great for an ego boost).” One man uses Mr. Mizrachi’s photo.
A recent search on Match.com brought up more than 90 profiles with such lines as: “I want an opposite. A yin to my yang,” or “You know that woman who is the first person on the dance floor at every party? That’s me.” They weren’t even from real people. They were cribbed from sample profiles posted online at E-Cyrano.com5 by dating coach and profile writer Evan Marc Katz. “It just seems so short-sighted,” says Mr. Katz, of Los Angeles. “Everybody steals the same lines so they are not original anymore.”
The Internet makes plagiarism anonymous and easy. Nearly half of high-school students and nearly 40% of college undergrads confess they copy online sources, according to surveys conducted by Donald McCabe, a founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University in South Carolina. Stealing for appearance’s sake is a new twist. “People are still trying to develop a sense of how to present themselves online,” says Joseph Walther, a communication professor at Michigan State University.
The book “Online Dating for Dummies” tells readers not to fret about copying. TheProfileCoach.com6, meanwhile, offers 12 “proven” profiles for $4. Sample: “There is a shallowness, a fakeness to much of the ‘singles scene.’” A number of blogs offer free headlines for social-networking profiles, including, “Ernie’s train of thought has derailed.” For $50, weeklyscore.com offers 20 personal essays and 100 headlines, all updated weekly.
[Cheaters]
Thierry Khalfa says he had a good excuse to copy: His English isn’t so good. The 44-year-old Frenchman first cobbled a ho-hum profile that said he liked to cook and enjoyed walks on the beach. Then he stumbled across the profile of Mike Matteo, 47, a screenwriter in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Matteo’s profile had such nuggets as, “I have a sweet tooth, love my strawberry twizzlers and cheesecake jelly beans.”
Without thinking twice, Mr. Khalfa says, he copied Mr. Matteo’s prose because it also fit him to a tee. “That guy should be proud,” says Mr. Khalfa, of Largo, Fla., who runs an auto-glass business. “In France, in the fashion business, when you see something that looks good, you take it and you copy it.”
Mr. Khalfa caught the eye of preschool teacher Marjorie Coon, 48. They exchanged emails, and Ms. Coon wanted to meet Mr. Khalfa in person. Then she discovered he had copied the profile of Mr. Matteo, by coincidence her friend. She let Mr. Khalfa know she knew and dumped him. “I felt he was less than honest, a manipulator and downright stupid,” says Ms. Coon, of Largo, Fla. Mr. Matteo wasn’t too happy, either. “I’m not Cyrano de Bergerac,” he says, referring to the 19th-century play about a man penning love letters for a rival.
Some copiers are harder to figure out. Cambria Lovelady, a 31-year-old editor in Austin, Texas, went on two dull dates with a man and afterward reread his online profile. He had copied her entire “About Me” paragraph including, “I’m afraid of heights and large birds.” And Dale Sherstobitoff, 42, of British Columbia copied this from someone else on Plentyoffish.com: “I am the type of person that likes to think of my glass as half full.”
Tracing authorship can be complicated. Chele Frizell, a 34-year-old nurse in Dayton, Ohio, swiped a MySpace.com headline from a friend: “Those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.” She confessed her theft in a missive to the MySpace page of Holly Payne, 34, of Hollywood: “I totally copied your headline, but in Spanish. Does that still count?” Not really. Ms. Payne stole it from the late Kurt Vonnegut.
Chris Garansi, an electrician in Rock Hill, S.C., says he has received about 10 emails asking permission to copy his dating profile, which is headlined, “Wanted outlaw princess.” Said princess is someone who “while climbing a tree can be all woman, while letting you know she can climb higher than you would ever dare.” Among Mr. Garansi’s requirements: “Chunky is fine but lumpy is how I like my mashed potatoes, and rolls are only good when served with dinner.” He says he refuses people who ask to copy his work. “Either they lack imagination, or they just don’t know who they are,” says Mr. Garansi, 43.
[Cheater]
Online administrators say complaints of copied profiles are rare. If a profile is sufficiently creative, its author could theoretically sue a copier under copyright law. But lawyers say it would be expensive. “As a practical matter, what you would probably try to do is try to get the site to take the copier’s profile down,” says Jeffrey Neuburger, of law firm Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner LLP. Some sites say they do that.
Last year, JDate.com7 released online dating tips, including the importance of a strong “About Me” paragraph. “So make it count. How? Look at what everyone else is saying and then SAY SOMETHING DIFFERENT,” advises the site.
Yahoo Personals provides two examples with the plea, “Don’t copy these profiles exactly.” But a quick search shows plenty have. A favorite among women: “If you love mushroom ravioli, romantic nights by a fire, and spring camping trips, please reply!” And for men: “I guarantee I can change the oil in your car in 10 minutes flat.”
Laurie Crane says three men copied her profile, apparently thinking it would spark her interest. One wrote, “We have a lot in common.” The 43-year-old art director in Chicago didn’t date any of them. “Who knows what these guys are thinking,” she says.
Finding her profile stolen angered Lavonna Short, of Sitka, Alaska. It also gave her pause. The 47-year-old mental-health professional says the thief used every qualification she’d written about her perfect mate: financially secure, able to take care of himself, not looking for a mother. It read like a shopping list, she says: “When I saw myself through someone else’s eyes, I didn’t like it.” She rewrote her profile—more mystery, less rigidity—and found her mate.
Guys, women of all ages find it creepy when you state that you are looking for a female partner 10 or more years younger than you are. It’s not uncommon to see profiles where men are looking for a woman half their age or less. While women who are age mates of the guys in question find the desires for young and nubile flesh offensive, so do the young women in question. The most common explanation is that the guys have money to offer in exchange for youth and beauty: that in itself is creepy. Not a far step from what made Eliot Spitzer lose his job.
Fellas, get real: Take a look at your license and figure out how old you are, and then go out and take a good look at women in the range of 5 years on either side of your own age. That is your target market, women most likely to appreciate you, along with your wrinkles and gray hair. They’ll also understand why you don’t want to go to night clubs, have to take Viagra, and don’t want to support them while they finish their education.
Read below an excerpt from a piece by Moniqa Paullet, a young 20-something, about approaches from older men:
Age is more than just a number in relationships
By: Moniqa Paullet
Everyone has heard the adage “Age is just a number.” Young women use it to prove they aren’t immature idiots and older men to show they are not creepy or lecherous. There is some truth to it in that every individual is at a different place in life and cannot necessarily be lumped into the stereotypes of a particular age group. I’ve met some more mature people my age once or twice.
But on the same note, every individual is different and should be judged individually without the bias the lines on a face may instill.
Does that mean I’m so open-minded as to be flattered by middle-aged men checking out my online profiles on networking sites? No.
Simply put, a 21-year-old woman is definitely in a different place in her life than an older person and is going to need different things from a relationship than he needs or is looking for.
I plan to graduate in May and go on to graduate school, better myself through education and hopefully learn more about myself and what I want in life along the way. Though smart and often mistaken for someone in her mid to late-20s because of my demeanor, I am not looking for a mature, committed relationship because I do not even know what I really want from a relationship yet. I do know I don’t want to help someone have a good time and feel young again.
I’m sorry to judge like that. And I’m also sorry if you are different and you are on a much younger emotional level than your years belie because I’m pretty sure I don’t want to help you grow up either.
Some will forever argue age is nothing more than a number, but it’s still a pretty good indicator of where a person is or ought to be in his or her life and needs in the dating world.
I try to be open-minded, but I still think people ought to at least act their age.
Strawberries are not just my logo: we grow them....
Drew says one of the things he loves about me is that I am game to do just about anything. Really, he knows me well enough not to ask me to do things I WOULDN’T do, like sleep on the ground in a tent, but, yes, I am pretty adventurous. And we tend to like the same things.
A real advantage to be of being married to Drew is that he loves to garden. I’ve always gardened, but what I really like to do is pick the proceeds and then take care of them. So Drew now does most of the gardening, we pick together, and in this case, I hull and clean quarts and quarts of strawberries.
Here’s the funny part: Our new home in Tallahassee is on a tiny lot that came landscaped and with irrigation. We planned it that way, because our home in Maine is on several acres and has more than enough outside work to satisfy the farmer and lumberjack in us. But our Tallahassee home does border on too tidy and perfect, so the first thing that we did was build a privacy fence around the back yard. That way, we can let that patch grow a little wild and frowsy. Then Drew pulled up most of the landscaping and put in fruiting things like citrus berries. We planted strawberries under the shrubbery, they spread like crazy, and we are getting tons of berries this year. Blueberries and blackberries are blossoming, as well as the lime, oranges, and grapefruit. We have an edible yard.
This morning for breakfast, we had our own strawberries, and then our jam on home made scones. What a treat.
We’ve had so many strawberries lately that I’ve been making jam (I call it Southwood Yard Jam) and giving away the prettiest fresh berries. I’m thinking of starting a modest fruit and vegetable stand on our front porch.
I just scanned a long report from Pew Internet & American Life Project which contained the following snippet specific to online daters:
From Pewresearch.com: Digital Footprints: Online Identity Management and Search in the Age of Transparency
9% of online adults say they have searched online for information about someone they are dating or in a relationship with. Perhaps due to safety concerns, online women tend to do their dating homework more than online men.
I frankly think that 9% is an underestimate, from what I have been hearing, especially from the ladies. Most routinely now Google prospective Internet generated dates. While the article really deals with managing online information about yourself, it’s worth a read. Regularly Googling yourself is just plain a good idea. And be ready to explain what comes up, even if some porn star has the same name as you. You’ll probably need to prove it somehow.
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