Online Dating Etiquette

Mr. Match and I have been discussing the etiquette of winks and e-mails for members of online dating sites. He gets lots of winks. I get few winks. In fact, I got a mercy wink from a friend the other night!

Okay, let's go to a sidebar here:

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If you've never been on an online dating site, let me explain a little of the format for you. There are several ways to search: One can push a button that says "Mutual Matches" and find people who have checked on their profile similar attributes to what you have checked. A second button is labeled "Reverse Matches" and finds the men who have said they desire in a woman the attributes you've checked. Or you can search for men between the ages of x and y within z miles of a specific zip code or city. The software then scores these matches — you're 80% compatible, you're 67% compatible, you might as well forget it. Okay, so I made that last one up. When these matches come up, you see the photo of the person, if he has posted a photo, and you see the first 135 characters of his introductory statement.

Maybe the reason I get so few winks is my intro starts with my Haiku verse (see below). Unless a man is a literary wonk (or really entranced by my photo), he's not gonna click on my intro to read the balance of the bio. (Ooooh, Mr. Match is lookin' better and better here, isn't he?! He clicked, read, and winked!) Mr. Match's intro, on the other hand, begins "I'm a retired [brain surgeon / astronaut / Supreme Court justice] . . .", his chosen career indicating money and status and desireability. (C'mon, I'm not going to reveal to you what he really said and let you snag this keeper away from me!) I maintain that if he started his intro with "I'm a nice guy who has led an interesting life and will treat you like a lady" (which, BTW, is 100% true), he would get very few winks. On the other hand, he is very handsome and his photos show that and he could start his intro "I'm a dufus" and still get winks because of his photos. (See earlier post below regarding the winks that are based solely on the image portrayed in the photos.)
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Back to the discussion of etiquette:

When someone winks at you, you receive an e-mail indicating that fact. You then have three options, you can wink back, you can e-mail back, you can generate a stock response that says "no thanks". Oh, the fourth option: you can ignore the wink. If you are a dues-paying member of the online site, you can e-mail other members, regardless of their dues-paying status. But people who have not paid the membership fee cannot e-mail, they can only wink. And e-mail addresses are not visible — it's an anonymity server — so I cannot just e-mail the person offsite.

So if I wink at someone, that indicates I'm interested. If he either winks back or e-mails me in response to my wink, one would think I would respond to his response. Mr. Match's experience is he winks or e-mails the winkers whom he finds interesting, and then hears nothing back from them. He asks me to explain this phenomenon and I don't have an answer. I'm too polite. If someone winks or e-mails, I respond, even if it's to say "no, thank you." I suggested the person had not paid the membership fees, which would explain a non-response if the person had winked, not e-mailed. But that doesn't explain an exchange of e-mails with no response. I said maybe she found someone else in the interim, to which he replied, "but it was only an hour from her wink to my e-mail!"

So I don't know the answer. Maybe there are too few Southern gentlemen/ladies out there, especially out here in the desert. Or maybe he's so cultured and educated and suave that the recipient of his e-mail was just knocked out by his missive and couldn't find the words to respond. (Hey, maybe the fates are guarding my interest in this keeper!)

Or maybe, just maybe, our Match.com cohorts are just people whose mamas never taught them to be polite.