Let’s engage in a little fantasy here.
(Not that kind of fantasy. Seriously.)
(No, not the kind of fantasy with elves and dragons either.)
Let’s imagine what online dating would be like if writing a “Thanks, but no thanks” email were a requirement, rather than an option.
But first, let’s examine the current system and why it can really suck.
Reality: No Thanks is Optional, Ignoring Frequent
On the majority of online dating websites, you owe a person absolutely nothing if they send you an email. You don’t have to write back. (It’s nice to write back, but not required.) You can totally ignore them, hit the delete key, and be on with your life.
With some paid dating services that allow non-subscribers to post profiles, the person won’t even know that you received the email. (That is, unless they pay the extra few dollars a month to get the Email Read feature.)
Reality: Some Sites Are Nudging Members To Do The Right Thing
Here’s where I give props to OkCupid. Yeah, I’ve had issues with them in the past, but after talking to their co-founder and watching how their site has grown and evolved, I’m changing my tune about this quasi-free site.
OkCupid publicizes whether or not you reply to first contact emails. Right under your profile on the search results page there is a line that tells everyone how polite you are:
Green: replies often
Orange: replies selectively
Red: replies very selectively
Now, before emailing someone, you can pretty much know what your chances are of getting a reply. Perhaps it’s not wise to waste lots of time writing red people?
Reality: Matchmaking Type Sites Require Closing Matches
On some of the matchmaking style sites, you have to “close” matches that you aren’t interested in. Usually when closing, you need to select a reason. Whether that reason is BS or not depends on you.
Fantasy: What If You HAD To Reply?
We’re adults here, but let’s be honest, a lot of people act like children online. But let’s just entertain for a moment that all online dating sites required you to reply to every email.
You could select from stock responses or craft your own, but there wouldn’t be an “Other” or similar cop-out answer. If you got to 5 emails with no replies, your account would be frozen and your profile hidden until you took care of your inbox properly.
How might this change the face of online dating as we know it?
Positive
- Fewer people would sign up “just for fun” (or at least, their profiles wouldn’t last very long).
- Everyone would get closure for every email they send.
- The 2:00 a.m. fit of desperation in which you send the same cut-n-paste email to everything with your preferred genitalia in the tri-state region just in hopes of getting one reply would be a thing of the past.
- You could wait to hear back from one set of emails before mailing out the next, removing the anxiety about having too many potential dates (seriously, it happens!).
- There could be an option to forward the email to customer service rather than replying if the email was spam and/or pornographic in nature, thus speeding up the process of getting the bad guys removed.
- As a dater, you would have constant feedback about your profile and pictures. You can learn a lot from rejection and change your profile, pictures, or email style to achieve better results.
Negative
- Fewer people would sign up for online dating, citing fear of having to reject other people. (Even though the current system of never knowing can be pretty cruel.)
- You would have to take the time to reply to everyone. (But seriously, if it’s as easy as pulling down a drop-down menu and selecting a canned response?)
- As a dater, you would have constant feedback. Some people can’t take constant feedback. Some people would rather hear nothing than be told “I’m sorry, you’re too young/fat/Republican/edumacated/blond/geeky for me.“
What do you think?
Is the online dating system okay as-is or would you like to see more sites requiring responses to emails or publicizing response rates on profiles?
Update: Check out this response by Moxie, another dating blogger.
About e
“No thanks” is a very powerful and polite thing to do with online dating. I generally tried to reply to every email I received that showed any level of effort, but some emails are so short or obviously such a cut and paste form letter that they deserve no response.
One possible solution is canned “no thank you” responses. If users don’t have to “think” about the response, I think they’d be more likely to send a “no thank you.”
A more draconian method would be to force users to respond to X % of their emails. I see a whole host of problems with that set up as well.
Finally, while I like the simplicity of the color coded example above, I could see some potential legal issues (if the TOS wasn’t worded properly) where someone could complain that the value of their membership was reduced by getting a red tag.
I think the best possible (though difficult) solution is to find some way using a carrot not a stick approach to getting people to reply more often. I’m not sure what the final answer is — but I’d love to hear more suggestions and incorporate them into our dating site. After all, our main goal is to improve online dating!
Thanks for the post,
Ross Felix
Founder / DatingRevolution.com
I like that idea! However, implementing it can be tricky. But it’s definitely worth it.
I know when I send out a response on OKCupid to someone that doesn’t reply very often, I may not really expect an answer. However, I have gotten a few replies, so its not impossible. Although I love the interaction and complexity of OKCupid, I have had better luck with PoF, which is kind of weird methinks.
@Ross Felix: We need a carrot AND a stick for this one. The stick can be small and the carrot can be bigger than the stick. Something like a viewable statistic similar to OKC’s reply percentage might be a good middle ground. Or maybe a level status, but that might make it more of a game than it should be. Can you see it: “She’s a level 12 dater, so I’ll email her instead of the level 3 dater”. But there should definitely at least be a canned refusal message to know that they are not interested. As well as some way to remove that person from showing up in your searches.
I think having to write a No Thanks email would open the door for spammers. There will always be those that use automated software to send out thousands of messages on these sites. Making the recipient send out a reply gives the spammer a better chance of converting whatever they’re trying to convert. Now OKCupid’s system, I like, but it still leaves something to be desired.
I say things are fine the way they are now. I am in my 60s and the women I e-mailed were in their mid-50s to mid-60s. I got about a 15% reply to my e-mails and winks. That may not sound like much, but it turned into dates with about 50 interesting women and twice found long-term relationships. I must admit that I have also not answered most of the e-mails and winks that were sent my way. The system is very productive even without getting responses to every communication, so just leave it the way it is.
I think ignoring and being ignored is better than replying. To me no reply is saying “No thanks” without any hard feeling. JMHO
For the normal adults out there, no reply means “not interested” and should be left at that. Unfortunately, some cannot accept no response and have to badger the recipients.
You mean…. people actually need help writing an online dating profile??? Yikes!!
I also think that saying “no, thank you,” opens up an avenue for a conversation that most people really don’t want to have: the rejected party might ask WHY. And who knows how he/she will respond to the reasons you give if you do dare to answer that question.
Imagine, as a girl, telling a guy “no, thank you, I’m just not attracted to bald guys” and having him come back with a flaming message about how you shouldn’t be so shallow and who the f— do you think you are and so on and so forth.
It would be very unpleasant, wouldn’t it?
Yes, the lack of feedback sucks, but you can kinda get that from elsewhere (asking friends for advice about your profile and pics, for example). The benefits of mandating replies to messages are just too little to justify the cost.
The problem with not replying is that it gives the sender no way to distinguish between “not interested”, “haven’t seen it yet”, and “still thinking about it”. The recipient may consider not replying to mean “not interested”, but unless something gets communicated back to the sender, they don’t know that and will spend an indefinite amount of time hoping and waiting it out. A “no thanks” reply beats days of checking for responses and would leave me with less hard feelings.
Having spent several $100 to be “no thanks” by several hundred women without a single date I’m all for it. As some people have pointed out “no response” is “not interested” but at some point I think we have a deeper responsibility to each other on a dating site. This isn’t me asking out someone I see every day who may or not be interested in dating but in a “I want to date” environment. If you get no responses over months while sending unique emails (no cut and paste) it’s not unrealistic to expect something more than just being ignored. Especially if you’re paying good money.
If nothing else, the constant “no response” only feeds cynicism, where you figure your least desirable aspect is resulting in constant deletes because of it. Then you conclude women are just gold diggers or shallow about looks (while complaining in their profiles about men who only want blondes/big boobs/whatever).
As for OKCupid and their response thing, that’s why I’ll still look there. And if you’re not green you can f**k off, even when emailing me.
I vastly, nearly infinitely, prefer to be ignored. A “no thanks” is an out and out, unambiguous and active rejection, which I find distinctly unpleasant. Passive rejection is what I’d consider far more polite, to be blunt.
I’ve discussed this with MANY people and they agree. No response at all is much, much easier to deal with.
I don’t care about not getting a response or getting told someone is not interested I just get pissed to think that I wasted my valuable time with someone not there for dating. I think all people who reply selectively should either come last in searches or or not come up at all unless they fit a very specific search criteria. That would give non responders an incentive to act like decent people. More importantly it would give more active members an opportunity to meet eachother. Also , why should guys have to do all the work anyway? Make the girl put in some of her own work to stay in the game.
@ LSV – OkCupid shows you in the search results who replies and who doesn’t. They have a red light – orange light – green light system. Very handy if you’re looking to save time and only email those who you know have the common courtesy to email back.
And about girls putting in their own work… well, I encourage my female clients to go after the guys they want. So do the other good dating coaches out there (like Evan Marc Katz). But the vast majority of women who are above average in looks assume that they don’t have to do any work. So they don’t.
I happen to agree that saying ‘no thanks’ is worse than not hearing back. I used to do that — ‘thanks so much, but I don’t think we’re a match’ and then the pleading reply often followed. I’d then get more responses from the very people I was not interested in, ‘just one date,’ “why not?’ and it makes it really uncomfortable. I say ignoring online dating emails is the one area it’s accepted.
@drea – I hear you there. I got the same begging emails, some whiny, some very demanding. At the first reply email, I’d just block them. In their perspective, it’s like you’ve disappeared from the site. You don’t owe anyone more than a “no thanks.”
There really needs to be some way of cleaning up all of these sites and getting the creeps/freaks (i.e. certain males) and flat out time wasters (i.e. certain women) off the pages and out of the searches altogether. I like the proposed idea that if a user does not respond to X % of messages within a certain time period, they should come up towards the end of searches. As far as men soliciting women for sex or money, there should be more of an active attempt on the part of sites to shut these accounts down for good. Women can say all they want about how they don’t owe men any responses online, but the fact of the matter is that men (like women) are spending money for memberships on these sites (except for OK Cupid…POF is such a joke that I don’t even count it).
@JG – I like OkCupid’s new policy of putting the red – yellow – green lights next to the button for sending a message, so you know how likely you are to receive a response. I think that’s a step in the right direction as far as the folks who don’t reply go. But you’re right – a good chunk of why people don’t reply is that they get emails from people who are totally NOT what they want. I’m not talking about “This person’s too fat for me” or “I don’t like blondes” it’s more the “This guy just asked me if I wanted to have my —- —-ed tonight. WTF?” I’d welcome a button that says, “This person is being inappropriate.” Enough clicks on that, and the person would get booted off the site.
Hmmm….I have a good idea and it is very simple. Get off those dating sites, get out of the house, and meet someone in person who may have the same interest as you do.
@CJ,
For many people (myself included), getting out of the house and doing activities isn’t enough exposure to new people to find a partner. While I appreciate you leaving a comment, it’s not the solution to everyone’s problem. (And to be fair, online dating isn’t the solution to everyone’s problem, either.) Here’s a post I wrote about why someone with a very active social life may still need online dating: http://geeksdreamgirl.com/2009/08/14/dear-anon-o-box-is-online-dating-for-pathetic-losers-and-failures/