I’d bet he’s doing more to reduce his chances of finding a match than they are reducing their chances.
In my experience, rigid approaches to online dating are rarely successful.
But he’s not even talking about success. He just wants to label the behavior and people who do it as rude.
I’ve seen this time and again on The Dope, when (generally) men don’t get the interest shown to them in the way they want to be shown it, they have a need to call the (generally) women rude, flaky, stupid, idiot or some other negative pejorative. It can’t just be that the other person simply isn’t interested in that way or is doing something in a different way. There has to be a negative way to describe it. And often, this is done when the person complaining doesn’t want to make an effort to show interest themselves.
I can’t say that all this applies to JThunder. Maybe he just has so many replies that he just needs a way to weed them out. But it has the same overtones, IMO.
I agree with you about the OP, but I was addressing Siege’s marketing comment, which may be true if the goal of the women is to market themselves specifically to the OP. But it isn’t. And they are probably more successful with their technique than he is with rejecting anyone who uses that technique.
Agreed.
I should not have used your quote to make my point. I agreed with your point in its entirety.
I don’t think it’s offensive either, but I do think it’s less than considerate, and in that sense, a bit rude. I do think that there are nuanced distinctions between the two.
Contrary to what Heffalump and Roo seems to be implying, this is NOT simply a case of not getting interest shown the way one wants. Rather, it’s a principled distinction. It’s less than considerate for the reasons that you gave earlier, Siege, with which I agree. Nobody here has begrudged anyone for wanting to save time. The issue is whether this foists the burden of effort onto the other person – either deliberately or through a lack of caution.
I understand that these folks generally act with good intentions – in fact, I emphasized that in the OP, right from the start. Even with good intentions though, one’s actions can be off-putting. I don’t think that the “wanting to save time” approach holds water, except insofar as it saves time for one’s self.
Heffalump and Roo, you say that this scattershot approach probably works for people who use it. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. Either way, it’s not the efficacy of this approach that’s the issue.
You keep repeating your conclusory statements as if that makes it mean something. There’s nothing in American etiquette that says that a short, polite statement asking you to look at a profile is either inconsiderate or rude. It’s simply a short, polite statement asking you to look at a profile; simply this and nothing more. All this stuff about shifting burdens is coming from you, because the only burdens that exist are the ones you choose to create.
Again, that is the whole purpose of an online profile – to help the reader do the initial weeding-out stage. Your correspondent has looked at your profile and has done the initial cut on that end. A simple request to do the same on your end is that – a request to do exactly the same thing that the other person has done. It’s not a “shifting of burdens” unless you choose to make it one.
bold added
OK, good. So we’re narrowing this down by process of elimination. It’s not that it’s offensive, it’s not that people aren’t showing the appropriate interest, it’s not that people have bad intentions and it’s not the efficacy that’s at issue. Now we can try to determine then what is the issue.
On the issue of rudeness, there’s no such thing as a principled distinction of rudeness. What people consider rude varies by custom, culture, class, geography, etc. There’s no such thing as something that’s rude across the board. For instance, belching loudly after a good meal is polite in certain societies and not in others. In this case, it’s the custom of online dating websites to allow for these types of messages and consider them within the norm as you’ve seen from the dating forum you posted this on earlier.
On the principle of wasting one’s time, I might* see a tiny bit of a commonality with being late for an agreed upon meeting. But even this has limits. And the difference between getting a short note and going to a meeting where someone is late or doesn’t show up is in the investment of time and energy. This note only take a moment of your time and doesn’t require a big amount of investment of energy or time.
Now if you decide to respond to the note, that’s your decision and from then on, the investment of time and energy is your choice.
So. . . what am I missing?
*if I squint my eyes and look at it upside-down
Well, speaking as someone who gets way more email than she can handle from a certain dating site–I do generally weed out people who send me this type of message. And it’s not because I find it rude. I don’t. It just fails to catch my interest. And in a situation of over-abundance, I’m going to go with the “ooh, shiny!” rather than the “acceptable.”
Now if someone sent me such a message along with a photo I liked, I would definitely look at the profile and if I liked it, send a friendly response.
I don’t think it does. If you get such a message, and you look at the person’s profile and think they might be interesting (i.e. they don’t immediately make you say “no way” or whatever) you send them back a note saying “I read your profile, you seem interesting and I’d like to know more” or something similar. The burden is still then on them, but they know that you a) don’t instantly hate them and b) actually reply to messages. I don’t think there is any expectation by the person sending out the “feeler message” that you will compose a lengthy reply or try to initiate directed and specific conversation. Just an acknowledgment or a no thanks is all that is expected.
Agreed. I think that the population of this particular message board is such that everyone has to qualify everything they say in overloaded PC language to avoid offending people, and demand that everyone else does the same. JThunder’s suggestion of “I realize that your time might be limited. Mine is too, so I was wondering if you’d take a quick look at my profile. Do you think that we might be compatible?” may seem great to him, but it sounds like a job application form letter to me and is overly formal and deliberately impersonal. While “Hey, check out my profile and let me know what you think” is also impersonal, it is clearly just a “shout-out” type of thing, not a stilted, composed request, filed in triplicate and archived in the head office, like his sounded. I’d be far more likely to respond to the latter, and reject the former as likely to be some sort of stick-in-the-mud who wouldn’t be much fun to be around.
(Just to clarify, I’m not saying that it is the OMG BEST WAY to initiate contact, just that I don’t see anything especially wrong with it, either. Would I be more likely to respond to someone who said “oh wow, you juggle? So do I! Can you do Rubenstein’s Revenge?” over someone who just asked me to look at their profile? Possibly. It would also depend on the volume of messages I was getting and whether I felt a need to filter heavily at that initial contact level, without reading profiles first.)
Maybe times have changed, but back when I was doing the online dating thing, most sites had a perfectly good function for “I dig your profile, do you dig mine? I don’t want to waste time/money with messages until I know”
Y’know, those little icons they call a wink or smile or nudge… or in Lavalife’s Maroon Period, a “carrot” (now there’s an obscure reference if I ever saw one). Clickety click and off it goes to the object of your affection. I’m pretty sure I got an intro email for one out of every ten I sent out, and another two out of the ten would send a return smile/wink/nudge to let me know that they are favourably inclined to discussing by email.
If someone’s going to expend the extra time and effort to send an email, then my expectation is some form of creativity. Maybe it’s a bit silly, considering I don’t fault someone for being uncreative and sending a smile/wink/nudge for the same reason… but there are plenty of suitably creative cut-and-paste intros that work for just about everyone (ie. “What’s on your MP3 player right now?” or “You have a beautiful smile” or “Coffee? Tea? Weasel Spit”).
I completely agree. It sounds like lawyer-speak. How annoying.
(I have nothing against lawyers, and I know lawyer-speak is necessary in certain contexts…but this is not one of those contexts.)
I don’t even bother to check those things. I get more actual email than I can handle, so I’m not going to bother checking out those people who can’t even be bothered to send me an email. And it’s not just me…I know that many women on my site feel the same way.