Online Dating and Virtual Assistants

One of the biggest criticisms of online dating is that the whole process is largely impersonal. These critics make a few good points though they tend to underestimate how impersonal the world of offline dating really is.

At the end of the day, there isn’t that much difference between browsing pictures and profiles online and scanning faces in the crowd at your local bar.

You can grasp a lot more information and subtle cues about who someone is when you meet them in person, but no matter what approach you pursue, dating is ultimately a numbers game.

Some men have taken this attitude one step further than simply joining online dating websites — they’ve gone ahead and hired virtual assistants to write their profiles, compose and send out messages, continue communication and build attraction with women to the point of setting up dates.

Is this taking the potentially impersonal nature of online dating too far? Or does it represent nothing more than the logical extension of seeing the early steps of dating for what they really are?

The whole idea of outsourcing your online dating life hit popular consciousness thanks to best-selling author Tim Ferriss.

As an advocate of personal outsourcing (hiring virtual assistants to take care of personal and professional needs), Ferriss decided to run a test to see if absolutely everything could be outsourced and brought to the peak of efficiency.

Ferriss’ test involved hiring multiple teams of outsourcers from around the world, assigning each of those outsourcers to a different dating site and then awarding the individual or team that produced the best outcome for his dating life.

Through this experiment, Ferriss set up dozens of dates, one of which resulted in a serious long-term relationship. Looking over Ferriss’ example, it seems clear that hiring virtual assistants to handle every aspect of your online dating life is a good thing.

What man wouldn’t make a small financial investment in assistant fees to skip to the best parts of meeting and dating women?

“If this is something you’re planning on

pursuing, you should probably set some rules.”

Before you take Ferriss’ experiment to heart and jump whole-hog into outsourcing your dating life, you need to first keep a big point in mind — Ferriss set some ground rules for those assistants facilitating his dating life.

Most notably, Ferriss did NOT allow his assistants to impersonate him. They did NOT send messages as if they were “Tim Ferriss.” They sent messages explicitly stating they were Tim Ferriss’ assistants.

Ferriss set a number of other rules to make sure the whole process proceeded ethically, such as telling every woman who made it to date number two all about the experiment.

In other words, Ferriss’ experiment only bears a passing resemblance to the all-inclusive online dating assistance being sought and offered these days.

Does that mean hiring a virtual assistant to take care of your online dating life is necessarily a bad thing? Not at all.

It just means if this is something you’re planning on pursuing, you should probably set some rules to make sure you and the women you meet don’t find yourselves hurt by the experiment.