Why doesn't anyone respond to my emails?
A reader wrote me this:
I write really good responses to women's posts on CL and profiles
on other sites. I read what they write and then i respond to specific
things they say. I try to be funny, but not too goofy, respectful, and
not creepy. I almost never get a response to my emails, though.
What gives?
Never let it be said that picking up women is easy. Whether you're looking for casual sex or a more serious relationship, it can be very tough to navigate these waters, and you have my deepest sympathy. Picking up women online has many unique challenges.
First, you never know how serious a woman is. Perhaps this is a profile she wrote two years ago, before she found her current boyfriend, but she hasn't taken it down because she likes the ego boost of having men respond to her. Maybe she posted to CL because wanted to see "what's out there" without leaving the comfort of her couch. She might even think that she's serious, but when it gets right down to actually going to the trouble of responding to people's emails, she discovers she's just not that interested. (I've pulled all of these, I'm sorry to say.) If any of these are the case with a woman you contact, you won't hear back from her, and it has nothing to do with you. Don't take it personally.
Second, you never know a woman is really a woman. This is more the case on CL (especially the CE section) than on actual personals sites, I believe, but sometimes the posts from women are posts from men hoping to get lots of pictures of cocks and bods. Others are business opportunities for porn sites and webcam operators. (These are usually so painfully obvious that anyone who responds to them deserves the spam he'll get as a result.) Don't take it personally.
Third, you never know how much email a woman is getting in response to her post or profile. When I post to CL, I get a minimum of 75 email responses, the bulk of them in the first two days. Most of my ads garner about 150 - 250 responses over the course of the week that they stay up. That's a shitload of email. Some of them shout out their lack of appeal: the ones that are just stats, or maybe just a picture of dick, no text included at all, or the badly worded, awkward married guys who are hoping for a quickie that afternoon. And others are so over-the-top appealing that responding to them is easy. But a lot of them are good, solid, interesting responses that I can't possibly do justice because of the massive influx of email my post generates. I am absolutely positive that I have passed up great opportunities because their email got lost in the shuffle. Don't take it personally.
You might be sensing a trend here. It's important not to take a lack of response to your email personally, because 9 times out of 10, or even 95 times out of 100, it's a matter of circumstances beyond your control. Don't kill yourself writing the perfect response to 10 women a day, because you'll exhaust yourself, mentally and emotionally. Try to approach it with good humor, and if you find yourself getting bummed out about the long odds, take a break. A lack of response isn't a rejection (and I'll talk more about rejection in a later post), and you'll do well to consider it a lucky break; if she doesn't respond to you, she's obviously not a good fit for you after all, no matter how good her post or profile sounded!
