Swiping right on potential sweets as if shopping online didn’t feel good to Jack Liu.
But spending $1,000 on Facebook ads, posing as a catch of choice for all the single ladies on social media, was right on the money for the Queens native.
“My ads were straight to the point,” Liu, 40, a digital marketing entrepreneur, told The Post, detailing the virtual love campaign he launched in 2020. “Women had to click on it and then fill out a form.”
“I would read the responses every day, contact the ones I found interesting, and then set the first Zoom date,” Liu said. “From there, if it went well, we would have a meeting in person.”
Self-promotion in cyberspace, while outlandish, was singles’ best form of defense against online dating fatigue.
It’s an exhaustion that plagues millennials and Gen Zs in motion.
Researchers have found that 78% of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings across the U.S. feel “burned out” by scarce and unavailable apps, according to a June 2024 survey by Forbes Health.
A recent report via DatingAdvice.com also determined that approximately 93% and 88% of young men and women, respectively, prefer casual dating to loose hookups on Bumble and its siblings.
Liu’s apathy towards platforms swelled amid the COVID-19 lockdown.
“During the pandemic, everything was online and Zoom speed meetings,” he said. “There was just something missing from those approaches.”
“I never felt like I found the woman I was looking for,” the promo continued. “Using apps, I never felt like I was able to convey the best parts of who I am as a person.”
So Liu took a punch ad him himself.
His cyber fliers, which appeared on Facebook and Instagram timelines for about a year, promoted the unwanted boyfriend as a creative, faith-driven entrepreneur who loved to travel. The cute description helped Facebook’s algorithms to attract the interest of potential people with similar values and weed out incompatible prospects.
“I thought my ads would get results,” said Liu, who founded ZipMatches.com to help other singles advertise online. “But I couldn’t imagine how well it would work to find Bethany.”
The lucky guy’s newsletter caught the eye of now-girlfriend Bethany Landby, 36, of Boston, in August 2021.
“When I saw his ad what stood out to me was his tango dancing and other shared interests,” Landby, owner of Allumette Candle Company, a brand that aims to end human trafficking, told The Post human rights and domestic abuse.
“For men, it seems like they have to slide endlessly just to get a match, and even then, it might not be a good fit,” she added. “Running an ad can cut through all of that and save a lot of time as it’s targeted and done for you.”
And while it is said that only fools rush, ultra-modern boys and girls looking for love widely prefer to take the shortest and most direct route to happiness.
Like Liu, a fellow New Yorker looking for “the one” — who chose to remain anonymous — launched a series of ads on Instagram at the start of the year. The millennial also created a Google Forms document in which he shares his height, likes and background, before posing a short list of questions to suitors for his heart.
But the avant-garde approach is not limited to concrete jungle honey hunters.
Tiffany Wong, 28, of Sydney, Australia, tells The Post that Google Forms helped speed up her search for a suitable suitor in the dating pool.
“Being a single woman in Sydney on apps is a minefield,” said the sleazy boyfriend, a stage and screen actor.
Due to her busy schedule, which often sees Wong working 55-hour weeks, she reluctantly turned to Hinge and Tinder for romantic help in July – but created the personalized survey to improve the hunt.
The doc, titled “So…Are You Going On A Date?”, asks the lovers about themselves, their relationship standards and their views on social issues. It helped Wong distinguish the studs from the duds.
“If they answered the form in a way that showed they were intellectual, funny and thoughtful,” she said. “Usually the dates would be exactly the same.”
The brunette collected over 25 dating requests in one month. However, she only agreed to date three guys through their fascinating answers to her questions.
But instead of finding Mr. It was on an app that Wong accidentally landed a man at a ramen shop in Edinburgh last month. The pair are now in a long distance relationship.
“He also filled out a Google form,” Wong said. “It intrigued me.”
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Image Source : nypost.com