Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Why are suitable guys so unfriendly?

My Email #1: Emailed guy on ok cupid because he sounded smart (one of few) and he mentioned xkcd in his profile, so I mentioned a couple of my favorite strips.

His Email #1: He drops the name of a niche computer program that I use often, which is actually extremely weird. Why would he think I would know what that was? And writes 4 or 5 more paragraphs, mentioning that he is away for 6 months and including no questions. Maybe he is clueless and doesn't realize he isn't giving me a way to continue the conversation.

My Email 2: Wow, I use that program a lot and ask why he uses it because I'd thought he was a computer programmer from his profile. And ask a few questions to keep the conversation

His Email 2: No, he's in my small sub/field. And 1000's of miles away. This email is like 2 sentences long also with no questions.

My Email 3: See you at the annual conference!

--------------

Another case: Also ok cupid. I email a guy in the fall, again one of the smart ones. he turns out to have been at my graduate school when I was and I was almost certain that we knew some of the same people. He CLOSES his profile. (I know he didn't just block me because I have a second account and tried from that one as well.) Did he just enter witness protection?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is not an answer to the question in the title, but rather a comment.

It seems natural that people may have the exactly opposite definition of "suitable"
(compared to you). I.e., they may want to keep their academic and personal lives separate.
Similarly, it's possible that the second guy simply doesn't want his fellow grad students to know that he is registered on a dating site.

JZ said...

Oh, that's interesting, though to be clear: the second guy wasn't in my grad school program, just the same university at the same time and did similar ethnic activities, so we must have had friends in common. Since people date in the same ethnic group, it would actually be a totally natural thing to connect on that basis.