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Hey, You Stole My Online Dating Profile
By Kyle | February 15, 2008
A hilarious Wall Street Journal feature by Jennifer Saranow today goes inside the culture of people ripping off each other’s dating profiles, self-descriptions and witty one-liners. Two great paragraphs:
A recent search on Match.com brought up more than 90 profiles with such lines as: “I want an opposite. A yin to my yang,” or “You know that woman who is the first person on the dance floor at every party? That’s me.” They weren’t even from real people. They were cribbed from sample profiles posted online at E-Cyrano.com by dating coach and profile writer Evan Marc Katz. “It just seems so short-sighted,” says Mr. Katz, of Los Angeles. “Everybody steals the same lines so they are not original anymore.”
here’s another classic:
Tracing authorship can be complicated. Chele Frizell, a 34-year-old nurse in Dayton, Ohio, swiped a MySpace.com headline from a friend: “Those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.” She confessed her theft in a missive to the MySpace page of Holly Payne, 34, of Hollywood: “I totally copied your headline, but in Spanish. Does that still count?” Not really. Ms. Payne stole it from the late Kurt Vonnegut.
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