Online personal ads.

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Ever placed one? Was it a nightmare? Ever placed a personal ad in a regular print paper? Did you find love? Tell us your story.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001

Answers

I did. It was a nightmare: http://www.soonly.net/muffet/Diary/021600.html

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001

I did. It was mostly an experiment to see what it would be like, although I was single and looking and was willing to give someone a shot if they were interesting enough. I spent a lot of time trying to decide where to put one up, finally picking nerve.com on the grounds that while it is an "Adult" site, it also has, you know, *words*, and I thought that might be a useful IQ filter.

I think I was right on that count. I definitely got some serious freako replies (I didn't contact anyone, I let them contact me), but they were literate freaks for the most part. Most of the replies were extremely dull or from people outside my area (most from Austin, and I'm not really up to a 3-hour dating commute). I struck up one or two email conversations, but nothing spectacular happened.

One guy wrote me who was different, but I wasn't sure in a good way. No serial-killer vibe, attractive, seemed to have decent social skills (this is a dealbreaker for me, I'm so tired of very nice, very smart men who cannot navigate basic social situations), but while he did appear to have interesting things to say, he seemed to be having a very hard time expressing it. "Sorry, I'm not a very good writer," he wrote at the end of the reply, so I figured if he knew about it he was at least sort of self-aware. I wrote him back. And then the next day he was the featured personal ad on the site, and so I thought, well, that's that then, he'll be too swamped. But he wrote me back, and kept writing me back through about two weeks of quasi- indifference on my part. And then he suffered through two weeks of quasi-indifference on the phone. We had nice enough conversations, but I wasn't getting any chemistry. That didn't stop us from having 2-3 hour conversations every time we talked, though. I finally said I was ready to meet, and even though I absolutely wasn't nervous at all and I didn't care whether it worked out and I'm sticking to that story, I got my hair done and got all prettied up and was 45 minutes early.

He walked into the pub behind me, so I didn't even get a chance to scope him out. He said my name and I turned around and shook his hand and thought, "Yep." And we sat down and I asked him how his day was and he said he'd just gotten a phone call on the way over telling him his grandfather had died. Not a good start, for most people. We talked for 5 hours, and then I went home with him. Obviously we're not most people.

After dating for 4 weeks, we booked a vacation together for a month later. On that vacation, he managed to get me in front of the mini- Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas so he could tell me he loved me and make it memorable. Just before the 4-month mark, two weeks ago, I called him from my car with my box full of personal items and said "Hey, I just got laid off." He was quiet for a second, and then said, "I love you," which was the only right thing to say at the time. He's totally got my back right now, even though I'm a total stressed-out nightmare bitch hag and I can't even stand me. I'm making myself cry right now, y'all.

He's a joy. He still turns his sentences into Escher-quality pretzels when he's nervous, but he's the photographer and I'm the writer and we fit together just right that way. And neither one of us can think of a single possible situation where we could have possibly crossed paths, so the personal ad was the only way it could have happened.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001


Wow. That's a great story, Lyn. Congratulations.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001

Yes, I placed one a few months ago, and did get a lot of responses, mostly married men, or men I wouldn’t set my worse enemy up with. I had a lot of pictures sent to me, some really nice looking men, without personalities, or a sense of humor, a couple of pictures of penises (no really two men sent pictures of their penises.)

I was looking in all the wrong places I suppose, Lyn sent me over to the place she went, but I haven’t posted there yet… I am still recovering from the last bout of “do I really want someone in my life.”

During the whole personal ad thing there was only one guy that I even considered meeting, however, we never could get our timing right. Oh well it wasn’t meant to be I was attracted to him because he was dangerous and reminded me a lot of an old boyfriend I use to write a lot about.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001


Yup. I slept with him on and off for two and a half years.

And that's all I have to say about that.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001



I put a couple of personal ads up on Yahoo a couple of years ago, when my lonliness was at a maximum. I made the first very simple, and I got about three replies from people who apparently could not put together a grammatically correct sentence to save their lives. (Of course, I also got several spam replies from porno sites and the like.) In an effort to up the quality of the people responding, I put a fair amount of time into composing a good personal ad. In the new ad, I basically copped to being a complete geek in an effort to filter out the functionally illiterate. I exchanged emails with three of the respondents for a while, and I hade one phone conversation with one of them. We arranged to meet at a local bar, and she stood me up. So, all in all, it was not a positive experience for me.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001

I married a guy I met through the personals. Hee. People are always so freaked out when I tell them that.

But my friend in Vancouver recently went through six months of having online personal ads on a few different sites, and she shared some of the responses with me. Out of the forty or so responses she got, there were maybe two who were decent prospects. Men can be so LAME sometimes, I swear to god.

I cracked up when I read Sarah Bunting's latest on it - she totally got it right. (tomatonation.com, if you don't know who Sarah is)

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001


Maybe it's Austin, which is full of young techie guys who have too much money and no clue how to spend it because they're working 80 hours a week at abouttogounder.com. Or that's how it was when I tried the online dating thing -- now that we've had massive layoffs all over town, maybe things have changed.

The online dating/personal ad experience contributed to my delusions of asexuality. Having to deal with all those idiots, jerks, and social zombies made me want to hide under a table and never touch anyone ever again.

Sure, I wrote a clever ad. The guys wouldn't even read the ads, they'd just email any woman with a picture that proved she didn't look like Roseanne. And some of them would not take a nonreply or even a "no" for an answer.

A real problem with online personal ads is that if you're turned off by poor spelling and grammar, you'll end up rejecting a lot of guys who would have been perfectly fine if you met them at a party where you couldn't see how badly they write.

If you can put up with blind dates and are willing to sift through hundreds of ads and dozens of dreadful evenings to find someone, well, perhaps it will work for you. I didn't have the patience or the stamina and I can't play the stupid little game where the guy grabs the check immediately and I'm supposed to look all blase, like I don't even know such a thing as a bill exists. Some women urged me to keep up the online dating because you get so many free meals. Yeah, but I can't eat with a toad at the table.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001


I did online personals off and on for over a year. I never met any scary people - there was the guy my friends call "Banana Bread Boy", because he brought me a loaf of homemade banana bread on our date (in it's own loaf pan - wrapped in colored Saran Wrap). He also spoke entirely in questions, of the "This one time? At band camp?" type. Then there was the guy who bought me dinner and then tried to kiss me afterwards, saying "Dinner doesn't even get me a kiss?" when I declined. But those were the weirdest.

And then there was Greg. Our first date was a year ago Tuesday, and despite the fact that I blew him off for almost two months because our first date occured at the fringe of my "men suck" period, he took me out a second time anyway. And here we are, living together in the bliss of sin, having the time of our lives. Like Lyn said - we never would have met either. He's an obsessive CD collecting comic book reading horror movie watching law professor from the Midwest; I'm a musical theatre loving no-B.A. having Buffy obsessed aspiring children's librarian Navy brat. But he makes me laugh like no one ever has, and at the end of the day, there's nowhere I want to go more than home.

Three other friends have all met their sig. others online as well, and all are going strong.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001


I placed one online personal ad on matchmaker.com, mostly on a whim. I probably got about 50 responses. 48 of them were ridiculous beyond belief -- particularly the one from the woman looking for a nubile bisexual college girl to be a birthday present for her husband. The 49th started out promisingly until I discovered he was someone I'd actually met and never wanted to spend time with again. President of the campus Young Republicans -- it just wasn't happening.

The 50th? Well, today is our year-and-a-half anniversary, and it's looking as if we'll be together for a long time to come. So I'm pretty pleased with the results. I don't know if I'd do it again, though -- it was an awful lot of idiocy to wade through to find that one person whose quirks matched mine so well. But I suppose that's the same however you meet people.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001



I know folks who have placed them. I've never done it myself, though. Most people I know who've done it have gotten a couple of dates and maybe a new friend, but that's it. My good friend Marian the Librarian, though, is happily married to her online-personal love and has been for a couple of years now. They have two cats, a minivan, and three adopted children. Happily ever after.

P.S. Shouldn't someone tell Sars she needn't bother, since she's already my secret imaginary girlfriend?

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001


I thought I was your secret imaginary girlfriend. Sars doesn't even have a dog!

-- Anonymous, July 26, 2001

I have three friends who have tried match.com, and all three ended up married. According to them, it was relatively painless. A fourth has just signed up, and is giggling with joy over the Boy Buffet she found there.

-- Anonymous, July 27, 2001

Ah, but Beth -- you are *aware* that you're my imaginary girlfriend. It's not a secret. So, that's different. Believe it or not, I was actually discussing this distinction just the other night over beers with Nita. Really. So, see? It's all good. This thing with Sars is just an imaginary fling. With YOU, though . . . well, that's serious imaginary stuff. An imaginary Relationship. And you're right about the dog thing. Sybmol's all kittened out these days. I can't be bringing an imaginary Hobey into the mix . . .

-- Anonymous, July 27, 2001

Over the winter, I put an ad in Nerve. Then, in the spirit of "why do something when you can overdo something," I placed ads on Match and Yahoo. Yahoo lived up to its name, yeow. Match was just as Sarah described it - no matches in sight. It didn't take me long to delete those ads.

The Nerve ad got a slightly higher caliber response, and I actually got involved in a short fling with a guy from Alabama. It didn't work out, but it was nice while it lasted. (I visited Huntsville - I could never live there. Oh no.) After that, I deleted the last ad.

I'm occasionally tempted to place another ad, since I meet very few people here in NC, but I've resisted so far. I have to say, the attention was nice while it lasted.

-- Anonymous, July 27, 2001



I met my fiance through an online ad.

For me, the yahoo personals worked well. I placed some ads anonymously, and some used my real name. It's free. There's not much limitation on space (unlike alternative paper ads).

It worked well to describe myself frankly -- "I'm short, fat and busty, with long brown hair and a great smile." That way, no guy who has a problem with fat women will respond, presumably. (text of some ads)

I think I only got one piece of hate mail.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2001


I've put an ad on Match.com, and gotten no replies so far. I just posted a picture, so maybe that'll help. I mostly did it as a joke after reading Sars' piece, but I wouldn't be sad if it lead to something decent either, even a friendship. So far, though, most of my matches have names like ItalianStallion and can't spell, so it's a bit of a bust.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

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