Eric's Personals Page

Update: 4/27/2001: I am now happily married to the love of my life! Therefore, I am not "available" for dating and am only interested in making new platonic friends.

Eric's Personals Page

Welcome to Eric's Personals page. I see personals as a means of directed marketing of yourself. Some see use of personals as a means of desperation, but I don't think that it is. If you aren't meeting appropriate soul mates through other means, what can it hurt to try personals, especially if they are free?

There aren't as many personals services out there now as there were in the late 1990's. Currently, there are only two services I am willing to endorse, one free and the other fairly pricey:

http://www.match.com is the personals service started by Gary Kremen, a Stanford MBA and the ex-roommate of one of my best friends. I personally know a person who married a person they met in match.com -- they have two children together and seem enormously happy and compatible with each other. Match.com is not actually free any more, but I include them here because they are, I believe, one of the best. They cost $25/month the last time I checked.
Yahoo! Personals is the personals service started by the nice folks at Yahoo! (which also happens to have been started by Stanford grads) This service is free to all. Unfortunately, several of the entries that you find there turn out to be fronts for Internet porn services.

All of the above services allow you to specify exactly what sorts of objective descriptors you desire (i.e., age range, whether they smoke and drink, etc.). A less adequate option might be to use the personals sections that are becoming popular in newspapers. Because these services are less directed than the Internet versions, they are less likely, I think, to be successful.

How to read a personals ad.

Attractive woman seeking attractive man -- This is a statement from somebody who is either very shallow, very stupid, or both. The old maxim (and famous Twilight Zone episode that served as the TV debut of lovely Donna Douglas, who is better known as Ellie Mae Clampett) "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder" really is true. There probably are a few people in the world whose physical beauty is fairly universally recognized (i.e., Pamela Lee, Brad Pitt, etc.), but most people have sometimes radically different opinions of what is physically attractive to them after those very few universals. As examples, many people find skinniness attractive (I don't), some people find obesity attractive (I don't). How can anybody predict how any other person will respond to their physical appearance? Anybody who claims to be attractive in response to such an ad is either very vain or very stupid, or both. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!!

Also, is a beautiful face or body (even if it did mean something to describe yourself or your ideal as "attractive") what you really want? Could you be happy with a person who on the surface is visually appealing but who has an incompatible personality? I couldn't.
Enjoys the good things in life -- This means that the person likes drinking expensive alcohol, buying expensive things, and generally pretending to be important and "glamorous". This is a very shallow person who most values other people's ideas of what "the good life" represents.
New to the area -- This means that the person feels like people who post personals are desperate -- they proffer an excuse to dispel the notion of desperateness.

So how do you write a good personal ad? I suggest that you concentrate on describing not just what you are looking for (why would anybody who meets that criteria want to respond to your ad -- if you've given them no reason to believe that you are appropriate for them?) or on describing yourself (you aren't likely to get responses from someone who meets your criteria if you don't specify what your criteria are), but rather on both. You should specify your criteria using as unambiguous terms as possible.

Eric's Romance Page
Eric's personal Home Page

To send Eric an E-Mail, click here.

This page last updated 01/03/02