This Toronto Woman Hired Someone To Manage Her Online Dating Profiles And It's Kinda Working

    Pretty brilliant, tbh.

    Lauren Strapagiel
    by Lauren Strapagiel

    BuzzFeed News Reporter, Canada

    Online dating is the worst. It's time-consuming, it's full of people you'd rather not talk to, and writing a profile is an exercise in anxiety. So what if you could hire someone to just do it for you?

    That's exactly what Katerina Lyadova, a 30-year-old Toronto woman, has done.

    Katerina Lyadova

    Lyadova (who didn't want to show her full face in this article to keep some mystery) posted an ad on Craigslist last month seeking a "dating profile manager."

    In short: she wanted someone to dedicate seven hours a week to managing her profiles on Tinder and OkCupid as well as set up dates. In return, they'd get $12 an hour.

    Lyadova's had luck with online dating in the past, but as a busy professional running her own graphic design shop, it's a big time commitment.

    "Everybody says the same thing, that it feels like a full-time job. That’s basically how the idea came to life, from joking that it’s so much work that somebody else might just do that," she told BuzzFeed Canada.

    "I thought why not. I’m single, I have nobody to answer to. I think it might be an interesting social experiment."

    After 30 applications and eight interviews, she ended up hiring a student whose job is to scour dating apps for potential matches.

    Craigslist

    "I really liked how passionate she was about the project. She didn't care about the money as much, she just wanted to be part of it," said Lyadova.

    The employee is on the lookout for passionate, creative, and well-travelled men who have something going on in their lives beyond a 9 to 5. They also need to have a sense of humour about how Lyadova is finding her dates. Her dating manager has agreed not to tell the guys they're chatting with a third party unless they ask.

    "If a guy thinks it's not funny and not appropriate then we're not going to get along," said Lyadova.

    So far, Lyadova has been on three dates, with one of them looking like a promising candidate for a second outing.

    ThinkStock

    "So far it seems to be working, and so far it's really interesting," she said. However, she's treating this more as an experiment than a search for love.

    "There are so many conversations about modern day dating, especially online dating. It's so impersonal, so objectified… like window shopping," she said.

    "Is it possible for a person who doesn't know me at all to do that for me?"

    The answer so far is a solid maybe.