Advertising Your Bitterness to the World

"PROVE to me there is a decent man SOMEWHERE on this planet"
(Headline in a "Women Seeking Men" ad in craigslist)



Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/) is a popular place for trying to sell a car, sublet an apartment, dispose of an extra ticket to a basketball game, or barter a video game collection for a used mountain bike. It's also a place where people try to find romantic partners or sexual hook-ups. In fact, I read somewhere that the various "Personals" categories get more hits than all other categories combined, although---big surprise!---men are nearly twenty times more likely than women to be checking out "Casual Encounters", and much less likely to be perusing "Strictly Platonic".

According to craigslist's criteria, the "Men Seeking Women" and "Women Seeking Men" categories are supposed to be for people seeking "dating, romance, or long-term relationships". Thus, they constitute the middle ground between friends-only and no-strings sex. Although I'm a happily married man, I read these ads from time to time to get a sense of what people say and how they say it. Given that I met my wife through a personal ad, I think that ads and online profiles can, if done right, be a good way to meet people---not the only way and not necessarily the best way, but a good way.

Of course, not everyone does it right. There are an incredible number of ads that say absolutely nothing about the people who wrote them; or that are little more than wish-lists to Santa ("... seeking someone slim, sexy, beautiful, and under 25..."); or that are riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors.

And then there are the ads that say too much about the people who wrote them. Although some ads are simply way too long (a good ad should tell the reader just enough to make him want to know more), others are of manageable length but send an unintentionally toxic message. The woman whose headline I quoted, above, is a good example. Her ad said that she has met nothing but liars, losers, and assorted lowlifes, and that she's tempted to give up on men entirely. It concluded with a paragraph that began (in all caps) "DON'T WASTE MY TIME..." (...if you don't have a steady job, if you live with roommates, if you bet on football games, etc.).

I'm sure this woman had plenty of reason to be frustrated, even disgusted. There certainly are a lot of liars, losers, and assorted lowlifes out there, and the woman clearly has enough self-confidence and self-respect to know that she deserves better. But by emphasizing her disappointments, her bad experiences, and her non-negotiable demands, the ad probably scared off the very people that she was hoping to meet.

Why would a guy who has a good job and a place of his own, a guy who's not a gambler or an alcoholic or a jerk, a guy who's sincerely interested in forming a stable relationship, want to contact this woman? A guy like that has options. Why should he want to invest time and energy on someone who has a chip on her shoulder? Why should he go out of his way to "prove to her" that he's not a loser like all the others? Keep in mind: all he knows about this woman is what she said in her ad. It's a lot easier for him to move on to the next one, which may have been written by someone emanating more positive energy.

The really sad thing is that the woman will probably never know that she's scaring the good men off. The lack of positive responses will only reinforce her notion that there are no good men out there, creating a vicious cycle of bitterness. I'm not saying that people should simply forget all the bad things that have happened to them, but they don't need to emphasize them, especially in a personal ad.