You know that charming but not TOO charming, witty but not TOO witty, flirty but not TOO flirty back-and-forth you’ve struck up with that guy at CouldThisBeTheOne.com? You might actually be flirting back not with that guy himself, but with virtual-virtual him: a correspondent hired to take care of the pre-meeting nitty-gritty online half of online dating.

The Washington Post reports that more and more singles (roughly 80% men) are getting some very personal assistants — whether their own secretaries or via a new cottage industry of ghost writers — to manage their online dating correspondence for them: creating their profiles and handling all  correspondence up to but not including the actual, real-life date. Why? Mostly, they tell the Post, because they’re busy. Really busy. And yes, to be fair, the online part of online dating — while efficient — can indeed be time-consuming. Then again, so can explaining why it was not actually YOU that they’d been flirting with the whole time. So.

Part of me wants to say “Hey, we’re all ‘busy.’ Make time, hosers.” But part of me can summon a little more rachmones than that. I mean, they’re trying. They’re not giving up. They’re not getting all Up in the Air and letting “busy” be an excuse for not searching at all. Tacky, maybe, but there’s some hope there, too. And I can always get behind hope.

What do you think? Acceptable compromise, or Cyrano-no?

Looking for some smart writing about sex? Check out Best Sex Writing 2009, edited by Friend Of BG and cupcake aficionado Rachel Kramer Bussel. This is not a collection of erotica (drat!) but a smart — and, okay, sometimes steamy — series of essays on everyone’s favorite subject. From Rachel’s introduction:

Sex is everywhere–in our bedrooms, classrooms, courtrooms, and offices, as well as on our TV and movie screens, streets, and newspapers. This was a big year for sex, from prostitution (Eliot Spitzer, Ashley Dupré, Deborah Jeane Palfrey) to teen pregnancy (Jamie Lynn Spears, Bristol Palin) and beyond.

If you’ve gotten past the cupcake thing (Mmmmm. Cupcakes.) you are asking yourself, exactly how smart is this collection? Well, it’s so smart that they’ve included a piece by LYNN HARRIS, “Searching for Normal: Do Dating Websites for People with STIs Liberate or Quarantine?” Not tittilating enough? Try FoBG James Hannaham’s “Why Bathroom Sex Is Hot.”

Read more about it at Rachel’s Amazon blog!