You Could Be Flirting On Dating Apps With Paid Impersonators (qz.com)

Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin sheds some light on the world of paid impersonators on dating apps like Tinder. Here's an excerpt from the report: Every morning I wake up to the same routine. I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas -- a client. I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes, sending their photos and locations to a central database of potential "Opportunities." For every phone number I get, I make $1.75. I'm what's called a "Closer" for the online-dating service ViDA (Virtual Dating Assistants). Men and women (though mostly men) from all over the world pay this company to outsource the labor and tedium of online dating. The matches I speak to on behalf of the Texan man and other clients have no idea they're chatting with a professional.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that these ghostwriting services exist. Tinder alone produces more than 12 million matches a day, and if you're a heterosexual American, you now have a one in three chance of meeting your future husband or wife online. But as e-romance hits an all-time high, our daily dose of rejection, harassment, and heartbreak creeps upward, too. Once you mix in the vague rules of netiquette and a healthy fear of catfishing scams, it's easy to see why someone might want to outsource their online-dating profile to a pro, if only to keep themselves sane. But where does the digital social assistant end and the con artist begin?

Comments

Every once in a while

[93 Escort Wagon]

I run across a story that makes me glad I’m an old guy... and this is one of them. I don’t know how you young’uns navigate these waters. I had a hard enough time just asking my now-wife out, way back in the day - and that was before all these peripheral complications existed.

Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it!

Re:Timeshare arrangements

[slaker]

Sex workers have a particular set of issues in their personal lives. They are, in a way, low-grade therapists, in addition to whatever physical services they provide. Sometimes they are an outlet for damaged people. They have to break social conventions for the sake of their professional lives and they have to deal with at least low-grade fear and jealousy from any loved ones aware of their occupation. I don't envy your lot. Your job is much more difficult than the fiction or fantasy suggest.

My problems are 180 degrees opposite of yours. I have a lifetime of alienation and isolation, no hardened exterior for the sort of careful intimacy one might have from starting relationships and only the barest idea what physical relations entail. I am a stereotype and a punchline and the only thing I can say for myself is that I absolutely cannot give up the idea that one day I will join the rest of the species as a functional human being.