Why girls buy Louisville Sluggers

Or: An open letter to men regarding dating

Lesson #1: Be! Agressive! B-E Aggressive!

Nothing kills a potential match quite like your inability to present even a semblence of a spine in your first correspondence.

Phrases such as "If you don't want to write back, I understand" and "I know I'm probably not the type of guy you're looking for, but ..." will earn you nothing but a sympathetic shake of the head as I hit the "delete" button and continue my search for Mr. I Have a Backbone.

Online dating, simply explained, is marketing of yourself. Sell yourself! (But not in that whorish sort of way - just so we're clear on that.)

Don't hem and haw and milquetoast* your way out of my consideration. Tell me that you're a great guy. Make me WANT to write back to you. Make it sound like if I don't write back to you in the next ten minutes, I'll regret it for the rest of my life.

Which brings me to:

Lesson #2: Write back. And not next week.

I just had to write a sorry-but-I-met-someone-else letter, and I almost regretted having to write it, except that I wrote to the guy last Friday, and he didn't write anything back 'til Sunday afternoon - and I didn't get it 'til Monday.

In the meantime, I had a fantastic date on Saturday with dude-who-wrote-back-faster-and-got-his-foot-in-the-door. If you're interested, you need to get on the ball, guys. Time's tickin' away, and the ladies are trying to make sure it's not their time that's going down the drain.

Lesson #3: If you're divorced, say so. If you're only separated, though - SAY SO.

That's self-explanatory, I think. I guess the converse side, for the ladies, is to ask. Ask very pointed, nosey questions. And ask them several times. Just to be sure. You know - in case he just forgot about a wife the first three times you asked.

Lesson #4: DON'T BE AN EFFING PLAYER.

Seriously.

If you're not interested in pursuing anything - if you're just in it for the makeout (or whatever) - be up front about it. It doesn't make you less of an ass, but at least we know what we're getting into, and we can only blame ourselves for thinking you're worth the effort of sticking it out ...

Don't feed me this BS about how "refreshing" and "great" it is to spend time with someone like me, signing your text messages with Xs and Os, calling me gorgeous and telling me how much you miss me - all while deleting my posts (and those of all your other refreshing, beautiful, missed girlfriends) on your Facebook/MySpace/Twitter pages so we "won't know what's going on." We're not nearly as dumb as you wish we were, and we'll call you for the ass that you're turning out to be.

If it turns out that things aren't going the way you hoped - be frickin' honest about it!

Don't string us along. It's early. If you want to cut it off here, yeah - it's going to hurt. But knowing about it up front and honestly and early is so much better than finding out about it from someone else's conversational whoopsie or having it confessed in an oh-by-the-way-I'm-kind-of-seeing-someone-else-too-but-you're-still-special-to-me-but-I'm-not-obligated-to-tell-you-anything conversation. That's bullshit. Flat out. Girls buy Louisville Sluggers over stuff like that.

Class dismissed.

* spelling correction courtesy of a not-quite-Anonymous reader/the American Heritage Dictionary. I still insist on using it as a verb in this setting.