WASHINGTON POST - June 1 - Virtual Dating Assistants (VDA) is one of the first full-scale Internet-dating outsourcing companies. For $600, Virtual Dating Assistants guarantees clients two dates a month; the "executive service" package promises five dates a month for $1,200. VDA do it all: write a client's profile, pick out potential matches, send introductory e-mails and message back and forth until a date is confirmed. Then they turn over the correspondence and tell the lucky fellow where and when he's meeting Madame X. Jared Gordon, editor of A Bad Case of the Dates, a blog that collects dating horror stories, said: "It's awful! You're misrepresenting yourself. You're lying about yourself." Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch, a site that tracks Internet dating trends, says this type of outsourcing is an ethically questionable form of "misrepresentation." Still, he expects the field to grow. Professional matchmakers often charge $5,000 or more a year and have a limited pool of matches. Online dating sites are populated with countless singles but can require more attention than some users are willing to devote. "It may look like instant gratification, like you dive into the pool and instantly come up with a fish, but it doesn't really work like that," Brooks says. "You've got to tap, tap, tap on the keyboard quite a lot to get anywhere." But for many, it's not just their time that's at stake; it's also their egos. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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