"Guide To Marriage And/Or Sex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

Meeting People through Personal Ads

These are those little paid advertisements that people take out in magazines or newspapers. A lot of people laugh at these ads, but in fact this is the way top stars such as johnny Carson and Joan Collins get most of their spouses.

If you want your ad to be effective, however, it must have certain characteristics:

1. It should say you are profoundly attractive. Nobody in the personal ads, nobody, is ever “average-looking.” If, for example, you had Elephant Man’s Disease, you would describe yourself as “rugged.”

2. It should be extremely specific. For example, if you’re a man, you don’t just say you’re looking for “a nice woman.” You say you’re looking for

“a 5’8” 23-year-old blonde Capricorn woman of Croatian ancestry weighing

109 pounds and having a degree in cultural anthropology from Duke University.” This lets everybody know you are in a position to pick and choose, and not some semi-desperate schlump who has to advertise for dates.

3. It should say you like “candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach.” All personal classified ads contain this phrase, not because anybody really wants to take long walks on the beach, but because people want to prove they’re Romantic and Sensitive. The beaches of America are teeming with couples who met because of personal ads, staggering along, sweating, and picking sea-urchin spines out of their feet, each person afraid to reveal to the other that he or she would rather be watching a rental movie.