Want to promote yourself in an ad in the personal columns? Go the outdoors route, selling yourself as someone who camps, hikes and takes long walks. From his study of personal ads, it seems the country "is being swept by a prodigious back-to-nature movement," says Douglas Raybeck, an anthropologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. About 58 percent of men an 62 percent of women in a study conducted a year ago included the outdoors as an interest in their ads. As a researcher, Raybeck is a bit suspicious: "That does not conform to my experience with the American population."
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