Have you ever checked your inbox more than twice a day, hoping to get a response from that sexy girl you emailed? How about more than every 2 hours? How about every 15 minutes? Don’t worry, it’s happened to most of us at some point… and we never know why. We have a good online dating profile and a flattering photo, but still… no answers.

Why is that hot girl not answering you?

Let’s start by looking at the average email a guy sends to a girl on an online dating website. Now, I’m not accusing you of writing one of these, but in case I *might* have, we should take a quick look. It goes something like:

Hi, I saw your profile and you are so cute! I like your hat in that picture, it’s so cute, where did you get it? Anyway, come take a look at my profile and if you like what you see, send me an email !”

This email can be divided into three parts. Bad. Badger. Badderest.

Sentence 1: Bad

The last thing a girl who gets 50 emails a day wants to read is another average guy saying something else average. Also, he forbids “cute” from his vocabulary. Cute is so bland and overused, that it hardly has any meaning to women anymore. Also, women want to be handsome. Nope pretty. Ask them!

Sentence 2: Baddest

“I like your hat” is a good example of bad online dating advice from MSN and Yahoo! Online dating “expert”. They say “find something on his profile or photo and ask him about it”. That’s great if you want to be his friend, but he doesn’t make any kind of connection, so forget it. I’ll tell you what to ask in a minute when I’m done having fun trashing this bad email.

Sentence 3: Baddererest (yes, it’s a word… at least it is now!)

Just a well-educated guess, but I’d say that 80% of bad emails to girls end with “come take a look at my profile and if you like what you see send me an email.” What’s wrong with that? First of all, everyone does it. Second, you should end your email with a command, not a suggestion! Salespeople and marketers call it a “so called.” to action”, like “BUY NOW!” go that heavy, but realistically, anything imposing and interesting is better than a passive “if you like what you see…” It would be better to end it with “Rabid monkeys are eating my fingers as I type, email me or I’ll be finished!” Actually, I like that one. Feel free to try it out.

So ends our “Anatomy of Bad Email” lesson…

Now let’s do some good email!

The most important online dating advice I can give you is… BE INTERESTING! Most guys write the same boring stuff over and over again. If you really want to blow her mind, try a combination of these two:

1) Have a sense of humor
2) Be insightful

Point 1: How to have a sense of humor

Do you want to learn how to write funny emails? First, read their profile from top to bottom, front to back. Choose something that is completely unique to this girl and ignore everything she has written that you have already seen on dozens of other women’s dating profiles.

Example: She says, “I’m smart, funny, unique, I love baseball, I study medicine and I also work on a chicken farm.”

Forget everything except the chicken farm. The chicken farm makes it unique! Try to let your brain make the craziest and funniest observations you can. You could write something like:

“A chicken farm? I love chicken! We’d be the perfect couple… You could hunt extra chickens from work and I could fence them in on the black market chicken. Eventually we could build a nest of eggs and get away from Sunny’s hit.” Chichen Itza!”

Wow, that’s a bad set of puns, even for me. Anyway, you get the idea. You’re touching on what makes her unique, the little detail that most men ignore to opt for easy, mundane things like “I like your hat.” Choosing the unique points will only get her attention, and having a sense of humor about them will win her over.

Point 2: How to be insightful

Guys don’t really read profiles. Sure, we skim through them a couple of times and look for points to talk about, but we don’t read between the lines. We’re not really looking for the depth of his words, the subtext of what he’s really saying… what he’s really asking for. What I’m talking about? Let’s go straight to an example.

Here is a section of a woman’s profile:

“I’ve been here before, maybe too many times, each time a little more jaded. If only we could be more honest with each other, the world would be a better place. I’m looking for a guy who is kind, faithful and sincere.”

Are you saying that you are looking for a kind, faithful and sincere guy?

Only on the surface. What he’s really telling us is…

“Men have hurt me.”

How did I get that out of the previous paragraph? She rereads what she says: she’s come back again and again, even more jaded, which means she’s been through numerous relationships, each of which ended badly. She wishes for more honesty, which means that she has faced many deceptions. And she’s looking for a guy who’s kind, faithful, and honest, which strongly suggests that she knows what she wants because she’s spent time with a lot of guys who have been mean, unfaithful, and insincere to her.

So, I look at this profile and I see a girl who has been hurt, and I know that she will respond to a guy who is kind, faithful and sincere. So is this how I introduce myself?

*NO!*

I’m going to make it even better. There’s a guy she’ll respond to much more easily than the guy above… a guy who GETS HER! Forget everything women say they want on the surface! In the background… they want to be understood (we all really do). Being a guy who understands who she really is and sympathizes with her is so much more powerful and rare.

To address that, I would write something like:

“I read your profile and couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness at your words. We all seek happiness in life, but disappointment certainly seems to find its way quite often. Like you, I simply seek a bright sunny day in a cloudy world.

Of course, I don’t address your problems directly, a subtle touch is all it takes to get your attention and let you know the potential is there. This would certainly divert your attention from the guys writing “I am sincere, honest and faithful.” You know… the same guys who hurt her in the past?

There are many other techniques for getting a girl’s attention in an email, but these two also demonstrate the valuable traits of humor and insight, which will make you that much more attractive to her. Pick the unique little gem on her profile and make it sparkle with humor. Read deeply the subtext of her profile and sympathize with it. She will reply to you by email.

What… did you think it would be as simple as typing “Hey baby, what’s up?” 🙂

Greetings and happy dating!

dylan alexander