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?
The online seduction manual
When I tell people that I work as an online-dating assistant, their initial reaction is of morbid curiosity. “How did you even find out about that?” they ask, voices lowering, leaning in.
In November 2017, I ran across an ad seeking “people with good Tinder skills” for a job as a “Virtual Dating Assistant.” At first I thought it was a joke, but I completed their online form out of pure fascination. I received a callback three days later.
Apparently, professional writers make for good online-dating assistants; knowing how to seduce strangers with the written word is the company’s mandate, after all. But the intake interviewer seemed just as interested in my ethical flexibility as he was in the journalistic details of my résumé. Could I work in an “moral gray area?” Would I be comfortable ranking clients’ photographs? Was I dating anyone currently?
I learned that there are two main types of writers at the company: “Profile Writers,” who create seductive and click-worthy profiles based on facts our clients have supplied about themselves, and “Closers,” who log in to clients’ dating accounts at least twice a day to respond to messages from matches.
Despite hiring writers to do this work, virtually none of what the company does requires creativity of any kind. Profile Writers follow strict guidelines, often recycling the same half-dozen clichés over and over again. If a client has a dog (jackpot!), all the Profile Writer needs to do is search for the word “dog” in their manual and choose from a list of dog-related one-liners, like this one:
“Hey. As an animal lover, I want to find out your opinion… dressing up your dog: yes or no?”
The process for Closers is a bit more complicated. The initial training period lasts several weeks before we’re given access to clients’ accounts, during which we must read several training manuals and submit draft responses to fake matches. At first, my trainer encouraged me to get creative with my replies, but by the third week, I was still getting back extensive rewrites. My most frequent mistake was asking career-oriented questions, which were deemed too difficult for some women to answer. “She seems more simple,” my trainer would write in response. “Let’s try a different approach.” My meaningful questions would disappear from our shared GoogleDoc, replaced by simpler, condescending small talk.
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