Okay, I'll chip in with another autobiographical fact:

I once had a job writing member profiles for an online dating service.

The pay was peanuts, but I needed the work, and it was kind of fun. It turned out I was pretty good at it, too. I had been a bachelor a long time, so I could empathize with the members. I tried to write in the "voice" of the member. It was hard work, but a real creative challenge.

I wrote profiles for men, women, young, old, divorced, widowed, never married, nice people and those who really, really deserved to be alone. (One guy was so obnoxious that the service cancelled his membership.)

The overall rejection rate for these profiles (there were several of us) was about 15%; mine was under 2%.

The work kind of petered out, and I burned out on it, too, but it was a real experience.