There are a lot of things that annoy me with first interactions in online dating. At the top of the list is definitely the misspelling of my name. If you’d like to woo me, and my screenname is actually my name, take the time to proofread what you have written to me to at least make sure it’s spelled correctly. I understand that autocorrect happens, but please care enough about the potential of meeting/dating me to make sure the ‘k’, I am sure you typed, didn’t get corrected to a ‘c’. My parents named me EriKa for a reason, and the likelihood of me ever telling you the reason, or conversing with you at all, is severely diminished when I feel like you are addressing my childhood friend, who actually does spell it with a ‘c’!

I have gotten some ridiculous first messages on dating sites. If your message doesn’t make any sense, I am probably not going to respond to you. One time a guy said “let me guess, Woburn Showcase Cinemas”. I am pretty sure I didn’t ask any questions. Someone suggested that maybe he was trying to guess where one of my profile pictures was from. That could be the case, but in most of my pictures I think I look pretty nice, and I don’t typically dress up to go to the movies. That guy also had a main profile picture of him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. If I was intrigued at all to find out what his message had meant, that all flew out the window with that picture. In this day and age, how do people think that’s actually an attractive quality?

Not at the movie theater

I’ve had people send me messages that just said “…”, “Wow”, “And?”, “????”, and even just emojis. If you can’t even start a conversation, how am I supposed to deal with meeting you? I am an intelligent woman. I’ll be honest; it does make me feel pretty good to get a “wow”, but please try to engage me in some way. Also, if I wink at you, that means I’m interested. What you should then do, if you are also interested, is send me a message. Winking back at me to put the ball back in my court doesn’t do wonders for my perception of you as a man. One particular instance, I did shake off my annoyance and sent the gentleman a message, only to never hear back. Hey, if you’re not interested, that is fine. But I winked at you first to clearly show my interest. You didn’t have to wink back if you didn’t like what you saw in my profile.

I have also gotten some interesting propositions. I’ve had at least 2 invitations for threesomes; one being with a couple, another being with 2 guys. I’ve had messages from a few guys looking for dominants. Those made me sad because they were young guys in their late teens/early twenties and it seemed like they’d never known a normal, healthy relationship. When one of these boys mentioned the household chores he would be willing to do, I did consider it! Hey, if someone wants to wash my windows, who am I to say no? I also got a message asking if I was into CBT. I did not know what that was, so I asked a couple of friends. They didn’t know either. Google wasn’t much help, as I didn’t think he was asking if I was into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But then I saw “CBT urban dictionary” at the bottom of the page, and knew I was 1 click away from my answer. It was an eye opener and I encourage you to look it up for yourself. I don’t know what guy would ever suggest this, but good luck to you if you are a man, or want a man, who is into this.

I’ll leave you with an experience I recently had. A gentleman wrote me asking “how long did it take to blow those guys up, all weekend?!?” It took me a minute to realize that he was referring to one of my pictures, where I am standing with 2 inflatable Patriots players, Bubba and Tiny. I did what I normally do when I get a message; I looked at his profile and pictures to gage my level of interest. It was not high. I didn’t respond back. I’d like to note here that I do try to normally respond with a “thanks, but I don’t think we’re a good match” type of message. But with an opener like this, it didn’t really feel like it was necessary. The next day, after presumably seeing that I visited his profile, he sent me another message. This may be my favorite one ever received: “God, you are so dope I can’t even handle it”. Of course I found this funny, and my friend told me that she’s going to say that to me all the time now, but still I had no interest in this guy. About 5 days later he messaged me again saying “Had some awesome bagel world today haha”. Had I unknowingly entered into a conversation with him? Why would he write to me again, as if we were in the middle of discussing our days? Is Bagel World funny? I guess the bright side is, at least he didn’t try to spell my name!

Tiny, me, Bubba