Don't Exaggerate Your Personal Attributes in Personal Ads
I've already touched on the value of presenting a positive and honest self-image. I have also warned you against fibbing about yourself. This point is so important and so often ignored it can not be stressed enough.
Like describing your physical appearance, it's sometimes tempting to make other claims that may not quite be lies, but stretch the truth. I'm talking about things like what you tell others you do for a living, what you own and what kind of personality you have. It's like keeping your stomach sucked in at the beach. It may work for a short time, but sooner or later the real you will show.
If you pump gas for a living and drive a 1976 Plymouth Volare station wagon, you might not feel like bragging about it, but it isn't a sin. It doesn't make you any lesser a person than a doctor who drives a Jaguar. You both put your pants on one leg at a time.
Regardless of what you do for a living or what you have, you can meet someone through a personal ad that will appreciate you for being you. Cliche but true. Meeting that person will be hard to do though if you tell someone that you drive a Jaguar, but you keep showing up for your dates driving your Volare with the excuse that the Jaguar is still in the shop because the clutch is back-ordered and is being shipped by boat all the way from England. God forbid that you also claimed to be a physician and she insists that you remove a small wart that she has...and you try to do it.
I once dated a woman who told me about the time that she responded to an ad by a man who mentioned in passing during their first phone conversation that he was an emergency room physician. It was only a couple of minutes before they decided that they would like to meet each other. She hadn't had time to tell him on the phone that she had been an emergency room nurse. When they met for dinner, she said that it was obvious that he didn't know a fibula from a tibia. She debated with herself whether or not to tell him that she knew he wasn't a doctor. Other than the slight oversight that he lied about his occupation, she said he seemed like a very nice guy.
She decided that she would call his bluff and she confronted him. She thought that by doing this she might save some other woman from his lie(s). It was a very uncomfortable scene for both of them. He was really a grocery checker who wanted to be a doctor. She told me that he seemed to have a lot of really good qualities and that she wouldn't have cared what he did for a living if he had been honest. She never saw him again because she didn't think she could trust him and she wondered what else he had lied about.
Try hard to be realistic and honest when you talk about your personality traits and personal habits. You don't need to always want to be around crowds to be considered gregarious, but if you won't get in an elevator if someone else is in it, you probably are not. If you can't boil water, do not claim that you are a gourmet cook. If you are a couch potato, do not say that you never watch TV.
Many men say something in their ad about being kind, caring and/or sensitive. Women aren't stupid. If every man who said that he was sensitive really were, there wouldn't be as many battered women in the world as there are. If you aren't particularly sensitive, it will become obvious soon enough. But, I don't want to just pick on men, women are also not always truthful about themselves and frequently give false information.
This article is an excerpt from our book, "Effective Personal Ads - How to Write Personal Ads or Respond to Personal Ads."
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