5

Keep Your Damn Shirt on (Literally and Figuratively)

First, one question for guys who post pictures of themselves without a shirt on: why? Seriously, if a single one of you could explain the thought process that takes place prior to you uploading a picture of yourself sans shirt, I'm all ears. Because here's the thought process that happens when I come across one of those pics:

1. No.

That's it. I don't bother to read the profile to find out whether or not you volunteer your spare time helping rescue animals or if you're the perfect blend of smart and silly, listing A Brief History of Everything as the last book you read and ranking Spaceballs among your favorite movies of all time.

Wikipedia
Great choice if so, but you're still a creep.

Posting that picture sends the message that you have nothing else to offer besides nice abs. Or that all you're going to do is obsess about your abs or be the kind of guy that lifts his shirt at the gym to check out his own abs in the mirror, which incidentally is possibly one of the douchiest things humanity ever realized it could do.

Don't get me wrong, abs are never a bad thing, but no matter how strong your core may be, it's not the foundation of a relationship. Unless that "relationship" is to take place between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. and you won't be talking. In which case, game on!

Figuratively speaking, some of you need to keep your shirt on, as in pump the brakes, which I accept is also just a figure of speech, but if you don't understand by now, the source of your chronic loneliness probably goes way deeper than anything I can help you with here.

4

Stop Speaking in Hyperlinks

Your online dating profile isn't a multimedia art installation. Seriously, use your words. And if you can't use your words, using half a dozen YouTube links doesn't suffice. This is not 2006, and you are not on MySpace. If I wanted to watch a bunch of shitty YouTube videos I would just turn on Tosh.0.

Wikipedia
Joking, I totally wouldn't.

3

Don't Copy and Paste Your Messages

This is not only super obvious but it makes you look super desperate. It also looks like you're just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Also, exactly how many women are you messaging that you can't take two minutes out of your life to bang out some new material?

When I first signed up for a popular dating site, I got a bunch of messages from guys telling me how much they loved reading my profile or how interesting it was. Which sounds normal, right? Yeah, except that I hadn't written a single word yet. Suffice it to say, I didn't reply to any of them.

I know reading all those profiles can get tedious, with all the words and no hyperlinks, but at the very least care enough to fake it. You know, the way us girls do when we eventually have sex with you.

2

Never Lead With "Hey Sexy" (or Anything Similar)

The type of guy that leads off with "hey sexy" is definitely the same type of guy that's catcalling you while you're picking up your dog's shit on a morning walk.

I'm pretty confident that if Nate Silver or any of his super-stats-nerd buddies ran the numbers, there is a near-zero statistical chance of a man leading with "hey sexy" or "hey hot stuff" (their lack of capital letters and punctuation, not mine) and still landing a date.

You know who says "hey sexy"? Larry from Three's Company. Do you know who that is? If not, that probably goes a long way toward explaining why you think it's cool to open a conversation that way. For what it's worth, Larry never got laid, and if he did he probably paid good money for it.

Adjusting for inflation, of course.

Dating isn't easy. It should be, but we make it a lot harder because we are all (yes, all) a bunch of idiots. Thanks to online everything, we're also a bunch of idiots that don't know how to properly communicate with each other. Add this to the laissez-faire way people go about dating nowadays, and sooner or later you'll find yourself among the same group of people on the same handful of dating sites all not dating each other. Everyone is stuck in a virtual limbo where we all window-shop each other's profiles and pictures and never do more than send a wink or a 4-star rating. The only way this works for any of us is if someone breaks the ice first.

"Hey sexy" isn't the way to do it, though. That kind of opening line is straight-up creepy and a sign that you're about five messages away from sending an unsolicited dick pic. Oh! Hey! Speaking of that!

1

Don't Ever Send an Unsolicited Dick Pic