My last name is Stayman, and I will frequently make a joke about my manliness when I introduce myself to people. Usually it’s something along the lines of “Stay-man, which I intend to do”. I have, however, somewhat been lying about that. I intend to stay a man of course, but I have veered a bit to the other side in a sense, too.

Back in college, some friends and I thought it would help our fraternity/hookup groups to make a fake girl’s profile on Facebook as an entering hookup freshman on campus. Using this technique we found a number of incoming hookup freshman, men and women, who either returned our friend requests or were excited about our “existence” and friended us. We invited kids to parties and events using the girl and we set membership records for Hillel and the fraternity. No one ever noticed that first girl they talked to wasn’t there.

Not my proudest moment, but they called me the Jewhunter in college for a reason, and I was darn good at doing anything it took to get people involved. I called it quits after that, despite my fraternity continuing to do it in the coming year to see if lightning could strike twice (it didn’t).

So then this year I posted on Facebook for Chanukah that I would re-do anyone’s 100hookup profile that wanted me to. Surprisingly, the biggest response to my post was from females, and I started redoing profiles. In the last few weeks I’ve done some good ones, but my best one was for a close friend. It was my magnum opus, the greatest profile I’ve ever re-written from a pretty decently sized pool of profile re-dos.

There was one thing I forgot from my days of the fake Facebook girl though: men surprisingly forget so often to talk about anything but looks. So I asked my friend how her newly revamped profile was going. “Terribly,” she told me. “Everyone is just saying the equivalent of ‘you’re pretty’”.

I think on both ends, we misunderstand what it is we’re supposed to see in a girl’s profile. Most women I’ve helped have either way too simple or too complex of profiles (ie: 2-3 pictures and 6 adjectives and then a message me tag at the end, or the polar opposite with their overwhelming life story and the maximum on pictures), and I think that makes guys panic and talk about the only thing all of them have in common: being a girl. We message about looks far too frequently, and sometimes it’s because it’s all we can manage to easily take away. So ladies, be sure to add some personality, I know for me that is usually the biggest factor. I’ll definitely message a girl with a personality before I message a boring girl, the pictures only serve as a filter for whose profiles I’ll read (so in that sense, yes, pictures are important, too).

And guys, seriously, pick out things that show personality on both ends. You’ve got to be fun, so find things in the pictures that aren’t their looks, even if their profiles are fairly empty. If they’re somewhere exciting, like say a picture in Rome, ask about their travels. It’s all about the details, so figure out what you can talk about that doesn’t mention looks.

Though I live an exciting life (I’m one of those people who has at least two things planned most weeknights and even more on the weekends), I often find myself running into a frustrating dilemma: boredom.

You see, even dating can be tedious — especially as I browse through 100hookup, reading the same lines again and again: “My name is _____ and I enjoy _____” or “I totally don’t know what to write here.” What makes it even worse is that we men are often even more boring (I’ve done my share of browsing the competition). My worst fear? That you’re going to be bored reading my profile.

So when I started taking this dating thing more seriously, I let my “About Me” section get a lot less serious. After seeing a friend’s brilliant newscast style profile (with quotes from international selections of women raving about him), I knew a new game needed to be played. So I stirred for a bit, creating profiles for friends after they asked for my help (there was the one where I recreated the Lebron announcement and asked women to take their talents to him, and then there was another where I tailored the profile to my friend’s personality and made it about building the “ultimate computer”). Eventually, I came to a conclusion: who better to sell Aaron Stayman than the greatest salesman of all time, the late, great Billy Mays?

It may turn some people off (“Who is Billy Mays?” some may wonder — well ladies, just message and ask!), but for the most part, it allows me to tell people the boring stuff in an exciting way. So many people come off as boring or generic in their online dating profiles, but every person is awesome in their own way, and many of us just don’t know how to show that. Most people would describe me as a goofball, and I display that as honestly as I can in the best way I know how.

So whatever you are, it’s time to show it — and in the least boring way possible — because if there’s one thing no one on this site is, it’s boring. I’m sure I’m not the only person bored with the selection, so go ahead and make someone’s day with something different.