This is when I decided to resort to the web, and it turned out to be the most powerful tool yet. I put up my ad, waited a few days... and eventually started getting responses! From the initial description you'd think that person is perfect, and I thought my search was over. But I quickly learned that a person couldn't be summed up in one email.

I devoted HOURS a day to my quest. Email really allows you to quickly get to know one another. It lets you find out what they're about, what they're like, etc... It lets you rapidly get beyond the surface level, which is where the family face to face meetings could never get past.

When I felt ready I would proceed to a phone call. That way when we talked, at least we knew enough about each other that we could have a REAL conversation. I never had the premise in my mind that I'm evaluating that person as a potential wife, but more of a friend and if the right stuff is there, then things will naturally progress. This mentality made it comfortable and easy to operate, because there was no pressure on either side. It allowed for people to just be themselves. A lot of times with just one phone call you could sense the chemistry wasn't there, and know that this wasn't it. If the person were within at most a 15 hour drive, I would actually make a weekend trip to see the person. Face to face was the ultimate way of knowing if anything was there.

This whole method though was proving to be extremely time consuming, and to keep up with all the email took massive amounts of energy. It's especially difficult over time to repeat your whole life story to each new person, when you've said it so many times before, and knowing that that person most likely isn't the one (based on odds). Naturally I would dip in my enthusiasm and dedication, sometimes taking my ad off for months to regain some energy and work on communicating with the people I already know. Every time someone serious was involved I would take off my ad to just concentrate on her.

Experimenting with add effectiveness...

Now and then I would experiment with my ad by changing the content in it. There are various themes you can go with, such as serious, humorous, religious, entertaining, etc... Then combinations of each, just to see how that affected the response rate. Getting tired of repeating myself I made a MASSIVE huge ad that was nearly an autobiography. People who already knew me thought it was amazing, but the new people I think were scared by someone who could reveal so much about themselves. I found that girls especially don't want all the information up front, they want just enough to catch their interest, and enough holes in the story to create a mystery that they can then work on putting the pieces together.

My original ads started off criticizing culture. It really bothered me that the culture viewed two tall fair skinned doctors from Hyderabad as being the ultimate match. The match making by culture is so mechanical, that I would give a ridiculous amount of bio-data about myself. Such as lung capacity, and the number of teeth I have. A little tongue and cheek humor worked well, but overdoing it would give the ad too much of a negative vibe and turn people away. People are attracted to various things, but all are attracted to a positive person. I always kept a starting theme that I'm just some prefabricated husband with a make and model, like the ad was for a car. Once I actually advertised my car, and that I came free (while supplies lasted).

I think it's important to keep making changes to your ad. You need to find that fine balance of content in your ad. Too much or too little of one aspect really can harm its effectiveness. I find that using graphics and pictures really helped. So I would put up pictures of myself, but if I put too many it got overwhelming. One time people even thought I was totally self absorbed and full of myself when I over did it on my sarcastic style of humor.