Kathryn makes the Boston Globe
Drew and I were sitting in our RV on our way south to Tallahassee a couple of weeks ago when I got the first phone call on my cell phone in ages (no phone reception on our island in Maine). It was Laura Bennett from the Boston Globe. She asked me a zillion questions (it’s a wonder I could pull myself together to answer at all, since we had been on the road for two days). Here’s the result below—the two quotes are probably all you need to see how tired I was. But thanks, Laura!
The art of cyber courtship
By Laura A. Bennett
When online dating coach Laurie Davis saw my Facebook profile, she winced. She tried to hide it with a polite smile and a demure toss of her shiny hair. But the damage was done.
“What’s wrong with it?’’ I said.
“The photo,’’ she sighed.
It was a snapshot of me, looking rumpled and grinning toothily, with a friend from school. It wasn’t flattering, and the crop was weird, Davis explained. And you should never have a friend in your profile picture - particularly not one who is attractive.
“A profile is a personal marketing campaign,’’ she said. “If you went online and saw a newly launched product with bad photos, you would just close the page. You wouldn’t wink at it. You wouldn’t buy it.’’
Granted, Laurie Davis is an expert in the art of cyber courtship, and my Facebook profile was not engineered to reel in mates. But no matter. These days, we’re refracted through so many media - Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter - that our social lives are inevitably a tangle of the virtual and the actual. And over the past few years, a cadre of e-dating professionals has sprung up to help people master the delicate craft of digital self-presentation.
“Now, anything you have online can be cross-referenced, searched,’’ said Melanie Dodson, an Internet dating coach based in Tampa Bay. “You have to be more aware overall of the persona you’re putting out there.’’
Davis, who splits her time between Boston and New York, offers several services. There’s the eMakeover, where she combs your dating profile and provides line-by-line analysis: move that comma, fix that grammar, leave out the reference to your dead grandmother, change that clumsy phrasing. Or she can choose your photo and invent a new profile on the spot. She will also help you write introductory e-mails and replies to matches.
Common pitfalls include adjective overload (“Some people say, I’m sweet, funny, sexy, witty,’’ Davis says. “Show me, don’t tell!’’), vague photos (“If I can only see half a face, it looks like you’re trying to hide that you’re not cute’’), and sloppy orthography (“Uh, hello, spell-check’’). Dodson likes to take clients to a local resort so she can photograph them lazing by the pool or leaning invitingly on the mosaic-paneled bar. “You should look like you’re having fun,’’ she said.
Kathryn Lord, a self-dubbed “cyberromance coach’’ in Tallahassee, cautions against showing too much skin. “And webcam pictures make you look like a bug,’’ she said.
Davis, who is in her early 30s, has been on Match.com since she was 19. Her first online date was a disaster. “He had at least 40 pounds on his profile photo,’’ she said. She had to pick him up. He was a backseat driver. He asked her to change the music in her own car. “But somehow it didn’t turn me off of Internet dating,’’ she said. Instead it made her curious about how profiles represent the people behind them. After years of advising her friends about e-dating, she launched her coaching business several months ago. She already has a core client base and close to 400 followers on Twitter.
“The Internet is an atmosphere of plenty,’’ Lord said. “The effect is that people get jaded and start thinking there might be someone better out there. They move on too quickly, without giving someone a chance. I try to get them to slow down.’’
Davis begins by assessing your target demographic. At a recent meeting with a 25-year-old Boston woman named Kerry, Davis tapped her pen on the table and leaned in conspiratorially. “We need to turn off the guy who is gonna wine and dine you and then drop you.’’ Davis opted to pepper Kerry’s profile with quirky details: her affinity for high-tech gadgets, her shoe fetish, her enjoyment of kayaking.
“I’d never get a makeover in real life,’’ Kerry told me later. “I think it’s harder to write about yourself than it is to make an impression when you actually meet someone.’’
A 29-year-old California man named Devin had Davis revamp his Match.com profile after several months of minimal dating success. She deleted the photos of him wearing funny costumes, making weird faces, or, in his words, “being shamelessly drunk.’’
“Instantly I was getting more unsolicited attention,’’ Devin said. “Winks, e-mails, you name it.’’
Within a few weeks, he had met a woman with whom he clicked. They are about to move in together.
