Having an IM conversation with a prospective date
On Monday, I reviewed Yahoo! Personals, and not particularly favorably. The most interesting thing about having a Yahoo! profile, and the reason I haven't deleted mine, is that even if you don't pay for the service, if you're signed into the Yahoo IM system, people who like your profile can IM you. It sets up a separate IM profile based on your personal profile, so it's not obvious to the people who see your profile who you "really" are.
Naturally, however, this leads to a whole additional set of advice for men striking up IM conversations with women they don't know. Here are a few tips:
1) If you're starting a conversation with me, it's because you've seen my profile, which includes pictures and information about me. Please, for the love of all that's entertaining on the internet, don't pull the, "Hey, baby, what's up?" and expect me to be instantly fascinated by you.
2) It's especially useful if you start the conversation by saying that you saw my profile, what caught your eye about it, and either giving me some information about you or giving me a link to follow to read your profile.
3) I swear I'm going to maim the next guy who starts a conversation with me with a "buzz". This is a function that causes my IM client to make a loud doorbell noise, and it does, in fact, get my attention. But it's extremely intrusive and annoying. There's no need for this -- most people have their IM clients set up so they get notified of messages, and if they don't, it's probably because they don't want to be disturbed.
4) An IM conversation is not an entitlement to my time. I step away from the computer on a regular basis, or I may be working and need to focus on a task. Sending repeated "Are you there?" messages does not impress me. I'll get to you when I have a moment, and if I don't, I've probably left the computer for a while. If you need to leave, you can say something like, "Sorry you had to step away! I hope we can chat another time."
Comments
Indeed!
I don't have a Yahoo!Personals profile so I don't get random IMs like that, but the few times that I've given out my IM name through dating site connections, I've been surprised at the level of entitlement some of the guys seem to have. It's definitely NOT a way to impress me.
Posted by: ghislaine | December 16, 2005 10:39 AM
oh!
i get a lot of [ding] messages off of random im's i get from people on yahoo personals. it irritates the hell out of me, and the number of times they say it is intensely correlated to the likeliness of me hitting "ignore".
Posted by: betsy | December 16, 2005 2:36 PM
Oh. God. Yeah, if mail is bad, IM is an order of magnitute worse.
I DO put my IM into my personal ads, so people can contact me. This can be amusing.
Usually the conversation starts out with "hi". Um. Great. No context, no idea who you are, why you are IMing me, or anything. I had this conversation the other night:
him: hi
me: hi. who are you?
him: m 35
me: your name is m? how odd.
him: [town]
me: um. who ARE you?
him: me
me: *puts on ignore*
Oh, and please don't try to friend me without at least introducing yourself. Here's the right thing to say in a first IM: "Hi, this is Joe. I just saw your personal ad. You seem like a good match. Do you have a few minutes to chat?"
Posted by: sapiophile | December 16, 2005 2:46 PM
Hahaha! Oh, god, I love that conversation. What I want to know -- honestly -- is... does that ever work??
Posted by: ClueChick | December 16, 2005 2:49 PM