Personal ads for dummies

Baby, you can crash my car..

Lately, my life has been fairly full; I just got promoted to a management position, I'm running 4 miles every evening and to top it off, the municipal court in San Mateo even wants me to show up for jury duty. As all this leaves ample time to meet women, modern technology comes to the rescue: the online personal ad.

But in this engineer saturated part of California, for every woman looking for a partner there are at least 10 guys looking for the same. So what's the best strategy? Which ad gets you a decent response rate? My findings might shock you...

Ads talking to the fact how funny you are, financially stable, charming, foreign born and your willingness to make romantic walks on the beach on a second's notice, aren't really effective. Surprisingly, this is the ad that makes you feel happy that your gmail account has a 2 GB storage capacity:

Do you want to marry an easy going smart man, buy a house together in this ridiculous market and make or adopt a kid or two?

Before then you could make love to me every night, share hundreds of meals, walk miles and miles of trail, whine about your job, meet my family, be my date to a company Christmas party or two, overhaul my wardrobe, crash my car, and other things like that.

I'm charming and will accept your quirks, as you're mostly lovely. I think I can convince you of that in one date. Two, tops. Life's good now. It would be better with you.

And the scary part is that if one of the respondents really might become my sweetheart, I -really- would not even care that she'd wreck my car... But at least the response rate shows me that there's still hope for humanity: there are still women out there that have a good sense of humor.