Men’s 8 Most Irritating Online Behaviors
December 23, 2008 
17 Comments
Every time I post an article about things women do wrong online, I get tons of angry responsive emails from women who feel I neglect to mention either that men do the very same wrong things or that men do other equally bad wrong things online. The thing is that I am just one person, and it takes me time to create all this information I put in my articles.
So when I write about what women do wrong online, I am not ignoring the fact that men are also guilty of doing wrong things online. I just like to address the sexes separately, because the mistakes men make online are either different from those women make or are “the same with a twist.”
Are you ready for the twist? Here are 8 of the most irritating online behaviors committed by men:
1. Athletic & Fit?: It’s time that all men realized that they are not Peyton Manning or Marvin Harrison. They’re not an Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer. Your body type is exactly what it is. So you really need to look in the mirror and make a determination of how you really look, because when you say “athletic and fit” in your online profile and only put up dazzling head shots of yourself, a woman is expecting a swimmer’s body to accompany that dazzling face. When what shows up instead is a dazzling face with a middle-aged body, the expression on a woman’s face is usually one of discomfort. When you post an accurate full-body photograph of yourself, you’ve already been exposed. Then you just let women make the choice if they are interested or not. It’s that simple. Lying about your body type never produces good results.
2. Stop Being A Salesman: When you contact a woman online, do not send her a cut and paste email telling her all the reasons why she should want to have a relationship with you, why you’re a gift to mankind and why she is a fool if she doesn’t answer your email. She can read your profile if she chooses. Your profile is intended to intrigue her. It’s not a sales brochure of all the reasons she needs to be in a relationship with someone she hasn’t even met yet. When you send a woman a message online, say something intriguing that will make her want to go and read your profile. Women do not want to read a cut and past email telling her how amazing you think you are. Let her find that out for herself.
3. Respect Her Age Range: If you’re a 50 year old man looking at a 25 year old woman’s profile that says she is looking for a man between the ages of 25 and 35, then you should not contact this woman. Period. You need to respect a woman’s stated age range for the men she’s looking to meet (give or take no more than five years). Nothing turns a woman off more than having her Father’s friends chasing her online. If a woman says she wants to date someone who is no more than five years older or younger than she, then she does not want to date someone twice her age. Men get visually impaired when they see pictures of beautiful women. Some men somehow think they have the right to date hot younger women half their age. Now there are some men can do this . . . but online is not the right place to try and do that. In online dating, you don’t stand a chance of dating women if you are outside their stated age range. Even if you would be able to completely dazzle a woman in person, online you’ll just be viewed as an old guy chasing younger women. If you want to meet younger women, get out of the house and dazzle them with your charm and wit – you’ll stand a much better chance.
4. Read Her Profile!: I’ve lost count of the number of women who email me saying “David, what is up with all these men who don’t read our profiles? I get so many men who wink at me when my profile clearly says ‘NO WINKS!’” Nothing turns a woman off more than a man who does not read her profile. Women are all about an emotional connection. So when you contact them, pick out something interesting in their profile and respond to it. By cutting and pasting a form letter to women without having read their profile, you are simply wasting your time. Online dating works, but you have to put a little effort into it by doing things like reading a woman’s profile so she knows you made some effort.
5. Nix The “Possession Pictures”: Before some of you get angry about this one, understand that I’ve ripped women on this same picture issue for putting up certain kinds of pictures with their friends or pictures of them from a distance. Men tend to put up pictures of their possessions – everything from their car to their Super Bowl tickets. The fact is that women don’t care about your possessions when they’re looking at an online profile. Now, granted, some women are looking for men to take care of them, but women still want to be able to see who you are when they look at your online profile. So put pictures up of you in different situations. Just be sure any picture you post is clear, up close, and current! If you have no hair, don’t put pictures up of yourself with a full head of hair. It’s just not going to work. Once again, you are who you are. There’s no need to go into salesman mode to get to meet women. There are plenty of women to meet out there – so represent yourself accurately and you’ll find them.
6. No Email Stalking: You contacted her once, and she didn’t respond. Why? Well perhaps she didn’t like what you wrote to her. Perhaps she’s busy. Perhaps there’s no reason at all. It doesn’t matter. If a woman doesn’t respond to your first email to her, email her again a week or ten days later just in case there was some snafu the first time (and so you won’t have to wonder if there was some snafu the first time). Doing this is perfectly fine. To send a woman a barrage of increasingly nasty emails for four or five days asking why she isn’t responding to your emails (or something similarly nasty), however, is behavior guaranteed to get a woman to NEVER want to communicate with you or see you. It’s frankly tantamount to email stalking. Two emails with no response equals you needing to move on to someone else.
7. Lose The One-Liner: I can’t tell you how many women have forwarded me emails they’ve received from men online whose first contact with them is something akin to a “hello” subject line with a one-line email body containing his phone number and an invitation to call him. It’s usually something like “Sally, give me a call sometime – my number is 301-555-5555.” How do men expect women to respond to this – by calling them? If a total stranger on the Internet sent you their phone number and asked you to call them sometime, you wouldn’t call them either. Women like to be intrigued and pursued a little bit. By sending this one-liner email, you did nothing to intrigue them. Get creative in your first email to women you meet online, and they’ll be offering their phone numbers to you.
8. Don’t Be An IM Stalker: Some online dating sites allow you to instant message with people you meet. This can be great! If you’ve emailed a woman several times and she’s never responded, however, do not start instant messaging that woman every time she gets online. You’re going to freak her out! Allow someone to answer you (or not answer you), but don’t become so obsessed over one person. Take a look at Yahoo! Personals. There’s TONS of people to date on there. TONS! So don’t start stalking one person with instant messages, and making them wish they would have never tried online dating in the first place. Respect when someone is not attracted to you or interested in you.
Online dating is fun. It also may be challenging at times. The best thing to do is to think of it as a party on the Internet, and don’t engage in behaviors online that you would never engage in at a real-life party.
If you want more online dating tips and/or a way to make your profile and contacts better, send me an email. I’ve told you here what to avoid doing . . . but there’s plenty you can do to make yourself a more successful online dater.
David
I know this way off the topic. But did you know that my daughter met her husband online they have been married now going on four years. Before we would allow her to see him someone had to be there with her. But now my youngest daughter likes to talk to guys online. There are times I do worry about who they are. I myself am not into online dating I had rather see the guy in person and know what I am dealing with. But I do agree with you on the respect for age ranges and not to go email or im stalking. I have yahoo messenger and I speak only to my daughters. I did yahoo chat years ago but did not meet anyone online.
haha I’ve been guilty of #1, but not on any dating site.
just got out of jury duty!
gosh that thing sucked!
anyway, i don’t do online dating at all……
maybe i’ll do it when i’m out of school and no longer have the fresh supplies of girls : )
Quick question : I never tried the online dating sites. Is there quality woman around the age 22 ? For some reason I don’t think the kind of woman Id want to meet would be searching online. But I may be completly wrong. By the way what I mean by quality is secure beautiful ambitious woman.
I’m thinking of joining a site because I moved away from my hometown and would like to widen my range of meeting woman. I’m not really a bar guy anymore.
Thx
This list should be posted on all on-line dating sites (along with the women’s corresponding list) so that everyone is on the same page. Men would be far more likely to reach their target audience if they followed them and more women would be willing to try on-line dating it if they thought that they weren’t going to experience one or more of the behaviors on this list. Maybe instead of calling it “Men’s 8 Most Irritating Online Behaviors” we should call it “How to Guarantee On-line Dating Failure.”
OMG! As usual, David, you are right on target with this one-WHY do guys post pictures of everything they own, and then only one picture of themselves from 50 feet away? Ugh! So annoying! Also, I’m 39 and have that I want to be contacted by guys 37-47 in age range…do you KNOW how many 60 year old men contact me-Blech!
Happy Holidays, everyone!
I wish every person would read this before they did online dating. I have had so many dates with guys who did not look anything like their profile pictures. Most of them use ten year old pictures. The age range is also vital. I am 30 and my date range is 28 to 40, but I get 21 and 65 year olds winking at me all the time. I acutally just deleted my profile because I saw the men who had my page saved and they were all really old and creepy.
Taryn, I usually ask those who contact me that are much older if they’d be interested in dating my mother.
David, I think that men really don’t think too much about their own bodies in terms of fitness when they are filling out that profile. Maybe I’m being too pollyanna about it, but I don’t think they’re outright lying, but merely more focused on getting a date and aren’t really thinking about how they can be attractive to women.
It’d be great if the lists were on dating sites, but I think that there would still be a lot of people committing the errors…its just human nature.
I am not a big online dater, but following Davids advice I met some wonderful people online. At first I had trouble with it a bit, but later I figured that you need to have some nice pics, profile that women find attractive, and always be honest.
Vince: you can find quality women online, and who knows you might meet someone older than 28, and she will teach you all the naughty things you need to know;)
By following most of Davids guidlines i’ve actually gotten responses from around 50% of the girls i e-mail. The most important thing to remember is READ THEIR PROFILE! Being funny is a big plus too. Its an e-mail so you have all day to think of something clever to say.
Yakub: haha thats good too know. I’m all about new learning experiences. Gotta keep growing, so here’s my first attempt at online dating.
If there’s any beautiful girls/women around the Okanagan area (Canada) that wants to teach me a lesson or two
just send me an email at Vincerheault@gmail.com
I could teach you some ”french”
btw Merry X-mas everyone!
I always wondered why some guys think the lines that don’t work at the bar when we’re drinking will work online when we’re sober.
David, so very true. Please read my profile. I’ve done the internet dating things on/off for the past 3 years. I’ve met some very nice men. I’ve also met some men that had me completely confused with another woman. Also, when you cut & paste, proofread before you hit send. Once a guy was using his cut/paste function and I got the wierdest e-mails. I would not expect someone that doesn’t take the time to check what he sends is going to pay much attention to me as time goes on. Before I go on a date with someone from the interenet, I always re-read their profile, and especially know their name. I know that personally I have a very hard time remembering a person’s name until I know them a little bit better. I think dating is a lot like meeting people in business. If you don’t have some background on them, they don’t think you take them seriously, and if you get their name wrong you appear to not really care very much.
David, so very true. Please respect the person and read their profile, get their name right. Give the meet a chance. Be honest about your picture and description. Everything is pretty obvious on the first meet, so why set yourself up for rejection/disappointment? And for people who like to cut/paste, read your message before sending. Technology can bring people together, but it can also make you look like an idiot with one press of the button.
Ooooops… what happened there? I got a message that my first post didn’t go, so sent a second one. sorry everyone. blah, blah, blah…
I think that the email stalking might have covered part of it; but, one time I had someone do it to me over the phone. He seemed really nice. Chat was great… I thought he was very funny… so we decided to talk on the phone after a couple of days… he seemed to like me… then when I finally spoke to him on the phone I realized that he lived with his mom, she was talking to him, and opened his bedroom door to call him downstairs for dinner… he was 37!! He had never been married… and then he told me his mom did not really like his previous girlfriend and forbade him to marry her because the girl did not want her living with them… so, all these things that had not been mentioned before… I told him I did not think we were compatible… and he almost cried… then got upset… then screamed at me as I hung up… and left me some nasty voicemails! I was thankful that he was honest… I would have ended up finding out anyway… you should include something about people mentioned who if anyone lives with them… and such stuff… including children that live with them… people who mention being single when they are really divorced… etc…