Are your first online messages butchering your chances of romance?

1 responses to "Are your first online messages butchering your chances of romance?"

1. 
     AuroraIN says:

   Posted: 11 Sep 11

   We all should take careful note of the possible interpretation of our profiles by the people we intend to attract. I am constantly editing my profile, yet I never believe I have it the way it should be. I think I am guilty of giving too much information or emphasizing parts of my character that will only scare away precisely the type of person I want to attract. So, I take the profile-writing advice very seriously. I literally comb through hundreds of men's profiles daily; I may spend 30-40 minutes at a time reading profiles carefully. More often than not, I catch myself laughing aloud and saying, "Give me a break!" There is a lot of unintended humor in some profiles. I edit mine every few days trying to avoid those same mistakes. I will continue to edit mine, because the truth is, don't we intend to create a profile to attract the person we're seeking? To cut down my time reading profiles, I have created a sorting system that allows me to jump directly to the profiles of people I think I may be interested in. Basically, I have a long list of deal-breakers, that essentially, come down to 3 "types": pictures, clichés, and the yet-to-be-classified comments. The tragic comedy that is my online dating life is summarily characterized by the hits and misses. These “types”, will be classified under the “misses” chapter of my book. I will not read the profiles, I decided, of men who wear sunglasses or baseball caps, have shots that are too close, too far away, have odd shapes or perspectives, include a picture of their car, motorcycle or boat, is a self portrait ingeniously taken with a cell phone with the aid of a bathroom mirror IF I can see the phone on the reflection of the mirror, or if the profile is accompanied by a shot of his bare chest or abs, or any other picture that suggests that he may be nude from the waist down. These pictures tell me he’s hiding, pretending, bragging, and/or too lazy to edit. The clichés often cause me to chuckle a bit or roll my eyes, as I scroll down to the next profile. For that reason, I will not read the profiles of any men who characterize themselves or state that they are searching for classy people; queens and/or princesses; desire chocolate, coffee or cocoa (rolling eyes as I type); try to keep it real and are laid back; want to be spoiled; lack completion and need to find their partner in crime. But, what gets me every time is when someone declares himself or is looking for “the classic ______” (fill in the blank) , which is most likely an astronomical sign. I question the motives of anyone who includes any of those phrases in their headlines or profiles. Obviously, I am not the girl for these guys. But, that search for “the classic _______” reminds me of the comedy central animated show “Drawn Together” character Xandir, whose goal was to save the captured princess and he always declared “I’m on a never-ending quest to save my girlfriend!” If you know the show, you may get the reference and the irony. But the yet-to-be classified type list of deal-breakers is still being compiled, but sometimes, when I see these headlines, I wonder who is the target audience? I think most men work out frequently and that’s what makes them have such beautiful bodies and they are proud of that and I can see why. But, when someone declares his workout habits in his profile, my immediate reaction is: he’s warning me that he’ll not have time for me or that he actually meant to impress the other guys. So, I ask myself what do I do with this information? The absolute worst of them all is rarely seen in my particular search results, but seeing it once is already too often, and that’s the discussion of one’s sexual prowess. I mean, come on, really, guys? Really? There are so many comments that come to mind, after the initial guffaw, of course. 1) Just because you wrote it down, does that make it true? 2) How little substance you must have to your character that you can only advertise something that can’t be validated before meeting you in person; and of course, 3) what do I do with this information? As I said before, we create our profiles with a certain type of person in mind, so I know that those men aren’t looking for me because if they were, they’d be editing their profiles as often as I do.

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