Match game: Ghostwriters spin dating profiles
After responding to a Task Rabbit request, Dan Hirsch, a writer who’s gay, became an OK Cupid ghostwriter for $55 US per week, plus a $10 bonus for each woman who agreed to a date.
Hirsch, who is now a master of fine arts candidate in dramatic writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was based in San Francisco at the time. He would sign into his client’s profile, message potential matches for him and arrange first dates.
“His whole rationale was that he wanted to get to the part where he could meet in person as quickly as possible and that the messaging was a big time suck,” Hirsch said.
It worked: His client met a match, though the relationship fizzled after a month.
At a time when people are outsourcing nearly everything, including putting together Ikea furniture, it’s not surprising that they’re outsourcing parts of their dating life.
“When my client told his girlfriend about his scheme, she seemed to appreciate him for what he was: a life hacker of sorts,” Hirsch said.
But he’s not the only one doing it, and if you’re looking for a match online, you’ve probably been reading through plenty of profiles that weren’t written by the person in the profile.
If the profile looked too good to be true, it probably was.
It may have been written by Lisa Hoehn, New York-based founder and CEO of Profile Polish, and author of You Probably Shouldn’t Write That: Tips and Tricks for Creating an Online Dating Profile that Doesn’t Suck.
After conducting in-depth interviews with her clients and choosing and editing photos for their pages, she creates their profiles. Each week, she does between four and 10 profiles, and work has been steady since she launched her business in August 2013.
“A profile is your way to get your foot in the door with a potential match,” Hoehn said. “It’s all that you have to entice someone into talking to you.”
And when most people are stretching the truth when it comes to their height, their weight, their salary and even their looks (posting pictures of themselves that are more than a decade old), having someone else write their profiles may be simply stretching the truth in another direction, said Dennis Hong, co-founder of LemonVibe, a crowdsourced dating advice site that combines elements of social networking and online dating.
“No one can argue that 100 per cent honesty is ideal in a dating profile,” Hong said. “At the same time, it has become a given that many people lie on some level when it comes to online dating. So if it’s become acceptable that we need to take someone’s photos with a giant grain of salt, why should we treat their words any differently?”
The profile is meant to be simply a starting point, a way to see the person’s interests and to gauge initial compatibility, said Bela Gandhi, Chicago-based CEO of Smart Dating Academy, which teaches singles how to date.
Gandhi’s company does complete online profile makeovers, but draws the line at taking over the entire account, and it won’t message anyone to score potential dates, though people have requested this many times.
She does help her clients learn how to date, though, and encourages everyone to take the process slowly, emailing and speaking with love interests over the phone before meeting them, just in case the person on the other end is a professional posing as a date.
“Talking on the phone will help to strip away the cyber,” Gandhi said, explaining that this is a must-do.
“It’s like interviewing for a job. The next thing you’re going to do is to have the interview with HR. You don’t send your resumé in and get a job.”
The problem, she said, is that most people skip this step, hoping to find love immediately, and then they get disappointed when the person they meet is nothing like the person they messaged — perhaps because it’s a different person.
“They swipe, text and go out on the date in an hour, and then they say: ‘What on earth was that?’ ” Gandhi said.
“They skipped 10 steps — people date like they Amazon Prime shop.”