I love how you can find just about anything you want on the Web, even, as we well know, Sweetie Pies. But I do have difficulty with the thought that busy people can’t make the time to manage their own love life. How do they expect to make a relationship work, with all the time that THAT takes, if they don’t even have the time to find the guy or gal in the first place? But where there is a need, a service appears. Here’s one that may work for you, if you can’t find the time to do what needs doing.
Busy Women Can Now Outsource Online Dating to VirtualDatingAssistants.com
With the loneliest time of the year right around the corner, Virtual Dating Assistants LLC, a company that has allowed men to outsource online dating since June of this year, has decided to open its doors to time-strapped women. Now busy female professionals can fully delegate their online dating duties to an expert team of virtual dating assistants for only $480/month.
Miami, FL (PRWEB) December 1, 2009—
On June 10th, Virtual Dating Assistants LLC entered the online dating scene with a unique concept. The company proposed to enable busy men to fully outsource their efforts on internet dating sites such as Match.com and OkCupid.com to a team of seasoned pros. The company’s virtual dating assistants handle everything from profile creation to online interaction and, ultimately, bring online dating offline for its male clients.
Since its initial launch, the company’s executives reportedly came to the realization that not offering to service women was a big mistake. According to Scott Valdez, Co-Founder and President of VDA, “While our service was initially designed for men, countless women have gone out of their way the past five months to make it clear to us that they could benefit from a service like ours. Once we were certain we had made a strategic error, we began testing profile strategies, emails and other factors to determine what approaches men respond to on internet dating websites. We had to make sure we were able deliver the same level of service and overall results to women before we officially opened the door.”
What we realized though, after talking to countless time-strapped women, is that they need help weeding through the masses for potential keepers. Plus, many of them want to take a proactive approach to pursuing the most eligible bachelors possible online.
That time is now. For $480 per month, the company’s virtual dating assistants will devote 40 hours towards helping busy women to identify and meet high-quality men through a variety of online dating websites.
“I had always assumed that professional men would find our service most appealing since they have to take a proactive approach and craft hundreds of customized messages to women online, which takes considerable time” remarks co-founder Mark Anderson. “What we realized though, after talking to countless time-strapped women, is that they need help weeding through the masses for potential keepers. Plus, many of them want to take a proactive approach to pursuing the most eligible bachelors possible online. Like our male clients, many female professionals simply don’t have the time to handle these difficult and time-consuming activities themselves.”
The company will guide female clients through the process of defining exactly what they are looking for in a partner (age, ethnicity, body type, physical distance, “deal breakers”, etc.) and then help them to brand themselves properly online so that they attract him. The assistants will continually weed through incoming emails (sometimes hundreds per week) looking for keepers but since the keepers aren’t always the ones doing the emailing, the assistants will also be filtering the databases of various online dating sites to find men that meet the client’s requirements. Once identified and approved by the client, the assistants will craft and send customized emails to them on the client’s behalf.
The company guarantees at least 2 dates per month that meet each client’s criteria but, based on pilot testing results, anticipates arranging an average of 6 dates per month for its female clients.
Statistics show that 58% of single women have tried online dating and that women, on average, have 30 minutes less free time each day, which means less time to devote to finding that special someone. Virtual Dating Assistants now has now opened its doors to these time-starved women looking for companionship.
ABOUT VIRTUAL DATING ASSISTANTS LLC
Virtual Dating Assistants is the first company to allow time-starved singles to outsource their online dating. The company handles everything from profile creation to online interaction and effectively brings online dating offline for its clients by setting them up with dates that meet their specifications.
The company is the brain child of Scott Valdez and his partner Mark Anderson, who originally had his virtual assistant schedule 79 first dates using online dating sites over a 12 month period. These dates eventually led Anderson to his wife and a happy family life.
For more information, view Virtual Dating Assistants’ website at: http://www.VirtualDatingAssistants.com
I just love Steve Penner’s columns. And boy is he hitting a very real issue with the time business. He is RIGHT ON! It has consistently buffaloed me that singles who say they want to find love can’t find the time to work the dating sites, much less a time to meet a prospective Sweetie sometimes for weeks. Come ON! As Steve rightly notices, young people, even if very busy, have no problem sweeping aside previous plans when love is in the air. Steve says if you would like to get on his mailing list and be notified when his new columns come out, then email him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) I always make it a point to read what Steve has to say. It’s worth it!
The truth about dating: Are you too busy to date?
By Steve Penner
January 30, 2009 6:00 AM
Finding time to date is a snap when you are in college or your early 20s. Remember?
What else are you going to do while in college? Study, attend classes, conduct research? Come on. We all know that college is one big dating service, and much of a student’s time is spent frequenting bars, going to parties, and looking for guys or gals to fool around with.
I just read those sentences to my college-age daughter and asked “Is that still true today?” She laughed and said “Uh, huh!” (And she actually takes her studies very seriously.) When I was in college way, way back in the late ‘60s, a lot of time was spent demonstrating against “the man” and attending peace rallies and “sit ins.” But even then, to be totally honest, a primary reason many of us marched in those rallies is because we knew it was a great way to meet girls!
Bar hopping and party going is a practice that most people continue well into their mid-20s and for some beyond, way beyond.
But for most people adulthood eventually hits, and with that comes responsibilities, loads and loads of responsibilities. As one rises up the career ladder, work tasks become more complex and time-consuming. There are business trips, memos to write, faxes and e-mails to send, meetings to attend, and worries. Worries about being laid off yourself or which member of your staff to lay off.
Then there are family issues. For divorced men and women (obviously I am not writing this “Are you too busy to date” column for married people), the responsibilities are seemingly never ending.
After all, if you have the kids Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and every other weekend, and there are parent teacher meetings and soccer practices and ballet lessons to factor into one’s schedule, your appointment book can fill up very quickly.
Many divorced adults also have to deal with aging parents and their health concerns and doctors’ appointments and visits to the hospital, rehab center, or nursing home.
So when can you find time to date? Well, many adults just claim they are too busy to play the dating game. So they don’t. And that is a big mistake.
At LunchDates, the dating service that I ran for 23 years, I interviewed many men and women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who said they were now ready to begin dating ...; finally. I heard story after story of men and women (especially women) who reported they had spent the past decade caring for an ill parent. Now that their parent had died, they had completed a year or two of mourning (and perhaps therapy), and now they were ready to meet someone.
I also interviewed divorced men and women who said they had put off dating until their children had finished high school and gone off to college. I would ask when they got divorced and some answered “Oh, about 10 years ago.” I would then inquire why they waited so long, and the response was usually something like “My kids needed me; I was too busy to date.” Now I am going to be brutally honest. Most of those people were just fooling themselves. They probably had not enjoyed dating when they were younger, and the thought of starting over again was terrifying.
But here’s the problem. No, actually there are several major problems with putting off trying to date for a span of years when you are an adult.
First, there is the obvious one. The older you are, the more difficult it is to meet someone. This is especially true for women. As I have previously written, a woman’s “Dating Quotient” (that is how marketable she is in the dating world) begins to drop when she reaches her late 30s, and it goes down a bit every subsequent birthday.
There are many reasons for this, which I have spelled out in previous columns, and I don’t want to repeat those reasons now. Suffice to say, as women move through their 40s, 50s, and 60s, the available pool of “quality” men drops dramatically.
So when a 55-year-old woman says she is “now ready to start dating” after taking the last decade off to care for a family member, well, what can I say? It is not going to be easy for her.
As for men who take years off from dating in mid-life, there is another problem. Many men inherently have trouble with dating anyway, because they inherently do not understand women, their emotions, their needs, etc. Then if such a man skips a few years, I guarantee he will have extreme difficulty sustaining a relationship for more than a few dates.
Yes, many men are oblivious in terms of understanding women. Men who have not dated for years can be as oblivious as I am when trying to read instructions on how to download a new program onto my computer. And that is pretty oblivious, folks!
Unfortunately, many older men and women also tend to become less flexible about their time and their dating priorities. So they pepper their conversations with excuses like “I can’t possibly go out on a Sunday night because I haven’t missed ‘60 Minutes’ in years,” or “Wednesday is my bowling night,” or “I am always too exhausted from work to go out on a Friday night,” or “I have dinner with my Aunt Aggie every Monday.” And at a time when the available pool of dating prospects is smaller than when they were younger, they become less flexible, when they should be doing just the opposite. So they set up roadblocks with such statements as “I just couldn’t go out with someone who likes (or doesn’t like) Elvis,” or “I don’t like to drive at night, so he should live within 10 minutes from me.” But people should try and become more flexible and open than when they were younger, and equally as important, they should force themselves to find the time to date. (You can TiVo “60 Minutes” and Aunt Aggie will understand an occasional missed dinner.) Unless you are one of those few men or women who really is happier alone (and I do recognize there are people like that), on some psychological level, most people really do yearn for a “mate.” Studies have shown that married men tend to live longer than men who live alone.
Moreover, one could make a strong case that many of these adults might have been a better caregiver or a more patient parent had they taken time for themselves and attempted to meet someone years earlier.
So my final advice for divorced, widowed, or even never married singles is to NEVER use the “I just don’t have time to date this week (month, or year) excuse. After all, those months and years can very quickly turn into decades.
Steve Penner was the owner of the Boston-based dating service LunchDates for nearly 23 years and interviewed and listened to feedback from thousands of singles from all over New England. He welcomes comments and feedback at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Penner’s book, “The Truth About Dating Revealed; How to Realize and Raise Your Dating Quotient,” is available at local bookstores and through his Web site http://www.thetruthaboutdating.com, where he also blogs about dating and relationships.
