On Dating Articles

I’m a picky writer. It’s a way to protect myself from bad work, and most importantly, bad clients. I don’t go for projects in which you get $1 per 500 words; I don’t write about business and financial topics as a norm, because I don’t know anything about the subject; and I do some SEO writing for target practice, not for the money itself.

In a conversation with friends about the nature of my work, I mentioned that, in desperate cases, I’d go as far as applying to projects writing dating articles. Most of the topics are all about common sense – more than anything, about the good judgment that sometimes people fail to have when they are looking for love.

I’ve bid on such projects on occasions, and I haven’t had much luck on love… ha ha, that was a joke. I know why.

The answer is quite simple: even if I know that these articles can help 1% of the world population getting some, at the same time I don’t believe in their informational capacity.

As with beauty magazines, these articles tend to put someone, who is already fragile in the emotional department, under a lot of pressure, and pile up doubts about one’s self-esteem.

I read beauty magazines bearing in mind that I’ll never be thin, or have the perfect skin, or even that I’ll never afford that Prada bag that will save my life. But, as with most people, there was a time when those “advice” would make me feel more down than up, because they were about things conceived as ideals. I’m all for ideals, but if it makes you miserable, then perhaps you should consider the way you are living your life.

When I pitch my ideas to clients, if it’s about dating, I try to convey a healthy point of view: the articles should be interesting, practical, down-to-earth, and should help clear up certain misconceptions about love and relationships that abound through the Internet, and in the real world. My guess would be that this pitch doesn’t sell, because people really want to believe that they are low-lives who will never be happy with someone else. That’s sad, and I daresay, not true. Everybody wants and deserves to be happy!

Try doing a search on the Internet with the keywords “dating”, “love”, “relationship”, and similar. For someone like me, who is in a steady, six-year relationship with a wonderful person, and who above all, did everything wrong during the courtship period, the results of such search are scary…