<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Six months after setting up her profile on match.com, Leila Myers was confounded by the response she was getting. &amp;quot;There was a theme: balding, 50-year-old bikers. It was funny, until it wasn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; says the 30-year-old Bostonian. She was looking for men within 10 years of her age, who were into music and culture and &amp;quot;could complete a sentence.&amp;quot; Instead, she got Harley riders who&amp;#039;d passed the half-century mark. &amp;quot;I tweaked my profile here and there, but the process was eating up an hour a night,&amp;quot; says the health-insurance analyst. &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t have minded if it were getting me somewhere, but it wasn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Besides, I stare at a computer all day. The last thing I want when I get home is to look at another one.&amp;quot; So Myers did what any hardworking gal would do: She hired someone to do it for her. The online dating industry is expect- ed to gross $1 billion in the U.S. next year, and many of its 40 million users have more cash than time. Faster than you can sing &amp;quot;I Want to Be a Billionaire,&amp;quot; marketers are leaping to their aid, offering everything from profile critiques to top-to-bottom outsourcing. (Ghostwriters set up the account, attempt matches, engage in e-banter\u2014do everything but show up at Starbucks in a red scarf.) A main target? Successful women who would rather spend their precious free hours with a great guy than with their MacBook. &amp;quot;Our clients&amp;#039; main weak point is time,&amp;quot; says Scott Valdez, CEO of Atlanta-based Virtual Dating Assistants (ViDA), who has seen his female subscribership leap from 20 to 40 percent since he opened shop last year. ViDA&amp;#039;s ghostwriters interview clients for two hours, create a profile, filter potential suitors, send flirtatious e-mails, and set up dates\u2014all for a monthly fee of up to $1,200. &amp;quot;We spend at least 40 hours a month working for each client,&amp;quot; says Valdez. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a full-time job for us so it doesn&amp;#039;t have to be a second job for them.&amp;quot;  Nancianne Sterling, CEO of Target Love, a D.C. area\u2014based outsourcing shop, says women who go for the full-package treatment &amp;quot;tend to work a lot and do nice things for themselves. They go to the spa. They pay people to clean their house and do their laundry. They can afford to off-load the things they don&amp;#039;t have time to do themselves.&amp;quot;  One such woman is Monica Astley. &amp;quot;I work a lot, and so does everyone here in our open-plan office. I couldn&amp;#039;t access my account on my work computer. I&amp;#039;d have to use my BlackBerry. The whole thing was stressful,&amp;quot; says the 40-ish New Yorker. So she hired Laurie Davis, of eFlirt Experts, dropping $225 for a profile makeover, ghostwritten e-mails, and advice. Suddenly, she was meeting the type of guys she was looking for\u2014&amp;quot;solid career, athletic and adventuresome, honest, at least 5&amp;#039;8&amp;quot;, without too much baggage ...&amp;quot; she ticks off a partial list. Though she hasn&amp;#039;t met Mr. Right, she&amp;#039;s had a few good dates, which is a few more than she had when she was doing her own legwork. Does she think it&amp;#039;s wrong to have a Cyrano writing her e-mails? &amp;quot;I only use her stuff for the initial contact. After that, it&amp;#039;s all me,&amp;quot; Astley says. Davis compares herself to a tax accountant. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s your salary, your financial information\u2014someone else just writes it up for you, and you approve it,&amp;quot; she says.  Not an apt analogy, says Mark Brooks, founder of Online Personals Watch, which monitors Internet dating trends. &amp;quot;I understand all the justifications, but, ultimately, it&amp;#039;s misrepresentation in the extreme,&amp;quot; he says. He admits that, in a business that is thriving despite its failures\u2014according to The New York Times, 56 percent of men who use online dating sites never hear from a woman\u2014there is a need to fix the system, but ghostwriters aren&amp;#039;t it. &amp;quot;Imagine if everybody started hiring proxies,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Then you&amp;#039;d just have virtual dating assistants chatting up other virtual dating assistants, and what a mess that would be.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/advice/a5281/online-dating-profile-ghostwriters/?click=rel>