You are reading this without being able to see me, and this text is your only experience of me. What I want you to think about is what I am writing, and every mistake I make derails your thought process, and gives you something to focus on other than my intended message to you. I know what words mean, and I choose them according to their meaning. In my experience, less than three out of ten ads I read on this site are written clearly enough that their syntactical mistakes are not a major distraction to what they are attempting to write and its meaning.
It always amazes me that someone will spend a fortune, both in money and in consciousness, on their hair and nails, makeup, clothes, cosmetic surgery, botox, et cetera , and then post a personals ad entirely in lowercase letters, with minimal, haphazard punctuation, atrocious spelling, strings of mentally undigested clichés, and no coherent message.
Why should you care about grammar and spelling? Won't your true soulmate see right through your inadequacies and fall madly in love with you right away? After all, you're not trying to attract a snob anyway, right?
Here's the problem: unless you post a picture, our only experience of you is your words and how you use them. You are trying to attract a man, not with clothing or makeup or perfume or dance moves, but with your writing style. Style counts for everything here. Every misspelled word is received by the men who read your ad like a piece of spinach between your teeth. Every sentence that begins with a lowercase letter, or that uses choppy abbreviations is received like foul breath, or too much hair on your upper lip.
We are lonely, as you are. We are looking for love and acceptance, as you are. The last person we want to give our hearts to is a woman who cannot demonstrate that she is capable of a single coherent thought. Our experiences with wildly irrational women are not pleasant experiences. We are looking for women saner than our previous girlfriends. We still carry the pain of wanting to make our lovers happy and having them reject our happiness and their own. Correct grammar shows a man that you are capable of reason, that you will treat his future children with dignity, and that your ideas and motives are crystal clear.
It is truly not my intention to upset any of you. By the eighth grade, someone should have already told you this. Before you write an angry response, if the spirit moves you to do so, please run a spell-checker, and get a friend to proofread what you have written.
I'm willing to believe that men are guilty of atrocious grammar and spelling as well. I am not looking for a man. I am writing this to heterosexual women because I am looking for a heterosexual (or bisexual or questioning) woman. The difficulties that you heterosexual women face in finding a suitable partner are so onerous that Sisyphus does not envy you. It is unfair. Life is unfair. I would rather have a happy life than a fair life. I am looking for happiness. Fairness is the consolation of the unsatisfied. Happiness is the consolation of the satisfied. Please let us satisfy each other as men and women.
Finally: I spent some time checking the grammar and spelling of this post, and I have made my peace with whatever errors remain. I have received a multitude of replies that claim to have found errors in my grammar or spelling. None have been terribly convincing, but I don't really care. If the authors of these replies had rather put their energies into their own satisfaction, they might not be lonely now.