More Cliches? How to Avoid Them in Your Online Personal Ad

Bartleby gives good advice to love seekers online, and his article is a good start to help you write a unique online profile. While I don't wish to argue with any of the points he makes, there are a few other things you should keep in mind when writing your online personal ad to keep yourself from diving into the depths of cliché.

1.Avoiding Cliches in your Online Personal Ad: Who do You REALLY Want to Meet?

Avoiding clichés when describing yourself in an online profile is good advice. The more specifically you describe the kind of person you really are, the more likely you are to get a response from someone who is into you as a person. Keep in mind, though, that describing yourself is only half of what your online personal ad should accomplish.

Your online profile should describe, without cliché, the kind of person you are hoping to find. A perfect example of this kind of cliché is the personal ad which says: "You must be fit." The descriptor "fit" can mean vastly different things to different people. For some, the word "fit" in an online profile means slender. To others, "fit" indicates a muscular build. Still others are seeking a fit partner not for a particular body type, but as a lifestyle preference.

Let's say you're hoping to meet someone you would consider fit. While writing an online profile, you should avoid the use of the word "fit." Examples of how to be more specific about what you're looking for include:

a. "I'm looking for someone to spot me while I bench press my sofa."

b. "I'm repulsed by men with beer bellies."

c. "I like to walk my dog three times a day, and I'm looking for a walking partner who
can keep up with me and Fido."

d. "I only date non-smokers and light drinkers."

2. Avoiding Cliches in your Online Personal Ad: Keep your Creepy Sex-Stalker Fantasies to Yourself.

Keep sex out of your online profile. Writing sex into an online profile makes you look desperate, like you need to overcompensate for a real-life deficiency. That being said, please do not tell the viewers of your online profile that you will "lick them up and down." No one wants to be told via the internet that you are the sexiest thing since the invention of the thong.

Of course you are looking for romance, and for most people, romance leads to sex at some point in a relationship. If you and a respondent have physical chemistry, you will have physical chemistry. Promises of world rocking and divine pleasure only go so far when not delivered in real life. Don't turn your online profile into something that disrespects the intelligence and sincerity of viewers.

If physical attraction is important to you and you want to include that in your online profile, by all means do so. Just don't make yourself look like an internet prowler when writing it. Here are some examples of how you can describe what you're looking for in terms of sexual attraction and physical compatibility, without being icky or trite.

a. "I'm looking for a man who thinks a woman with short hair is daring and sexy."

b. "My ideal woman wears floral print sundresses and straw hats."

c. "I'd rather be spanked than massaged, and prefer a man to be physically aggressive in the bedroom."

d. "My favorite place to make love is in the bathtub."

3. Avoiding Cliches in your Online Personal Ad: Know Where You're Posting.

The above-mentioned clichés found in online personal ads are annoying, but can often be written off as honest mistakes on the part of the writer. The third and final online profile cliché has no excuse as it results from just plain, old-fashioned carelessness.

Before you write and post an online personal ad, take some time to look around the website. You make yourself look sloppy when you post an online profile to a site that obviously doesn't match either your personality or your preferences. If you are looking for a traditional courtship that leads to marriage and children, stay away from alternative lifestyle personals sites. If you are not Jewish nor looking to date someone who is, don't post your personal ad on a dating website for Jewish singles. If you and your mate are looking for a third to join the party, don't post to a site for strictly heterosexual match-ups. You get the point.

Placing your online profile on the right site for you goes deeper than that, though. Even generic dating sites cater to and attract different kinds of people. Craigslist is completely different from Nerve, which is completely different from Match.com. Get a sense of where you think your online profile is most likely to be well-received and seen by people you'd actually like to meet.

If you want to post your personal ad on multiple dating sites, fine. Just keep in mind that the practice of copying the same post onto multiple sites or including links to other sites is a cliché I've being seeing quite a bit of lately. When I see an online personal ad that says something like, "If you'd like to get to know me, click this link to see the profile on which I actually spent effort," I think a couple of things. First, are you really that lazy? Second, are you really so desperate you need to put yourself on every personal site you came up with when you Googled "online dating service?" There's nothing wrong with increasing your odds of finding true love by increasing your exposure, but something does feel wrong to a viewer when you make it known that you can't come up with interesting things to say about yourself more than once.