Read Between the Adjectives

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've decided to try online dating again. I am in the process of setting up my profile on a new site. I won't say which one it is, except to say that it rhymes with weharmony, as in "we will bombard your inbox with 75 e-mails in two weeks (I am not exaggerating the number)" and "we will not tell you which profiles are active; we'll just let you pay a bunch of money first before you realize that at least a third of the matches we send you are inactive hahahahahahaha SUCKER".

This site is definitely pricier than the other ones, but I already tried a free dating site last year, aka NotOkcupid.com. I also tried the less expensive Match(Me with a bunch of stalkers who will repeatedly e-mail me even after I ignored their first wink and e-mail until my blocked users list is longer than my potential matches list).com.

From my experience with the other two sites, people generally get matched with each other by keywords in their profile. We're supposed to use a bunch of adjectives to describe ourselves, which is hard because I try to avoid too many adjectives in my own writing. For example, one of the things I always liked about Sandra Cisneros, one of my favorite authors, was that rather than using a bunch of adjectives, she uses all these great similes and metaphors that make what she's describing that much more vivid.

So here goes:
My friends would describe me as:

Hard-working (It's highly likely that I will cancel dates if I have too much work to do. Or if there's a Law and Order marathon.)

Respectful (I sometimes yell at strangers in public if they touch me inappropriately/blast their music too loud/try to run over me with their car; it's called a WALK sign, not a honk-curse-barrel-through-pedestrians sign, jerks, so SLOW DOWN or I WILL yell at you)

Creative (If the date isn't going well or you aren't who you said you were, I will think of 35 excuses to end the date early.)

Ambitious (My ambition is to become a professor, so if I find a tenure-track job at a great school in College Town, USA and you aren't willing to relocate, I will probably dump you.)

I've been matched with a bunch of "ambitious" guys, and as far as the guys are concerned, that could mean anything:

My ambition is to stop using my parents like an ATM by the time I'm 40.

My ambition is to eat 100 jellybeans in one minute.

My ambition is to go one month without showering.

I'm thinking that complete honesty probably isn't the best policy. I don't lie in my profile, but sometimes I'm tempted to write about how neurotic I truly am just to see what kind of response I get. I'm also thinking that "Neurotic Workaholic" may be a funny blogging pseudonym, but probably won't get me as many laughs if I put that as my online dating screenname. I could also try "Little Miss Freaks-Out-a-Lot" but I doubt that will work. So for this site I'm just using my first name.

What do you think of online dating profiles? Even if you've never tried online dating, do you think it's possible to get a good sense of who a person is (and figure out whether or not you want to e-mail that person) by reading his/her profile? My opinion is that you can actually find out a lot about a person by what he writes (and doesn't write).

Check out this funny video about online dating; it "translates" the things that guys put in their profiles: .


I'm off to buy a thesaurus. What's another word for "judgmental pessimist"?