Winks aren't sexy so much as humorous. They can be conspirational.

No. They only become stupid, if you get too many of them. This is much more likely to happen to a woman then a man. Men are much more likely to wink at many women, while I think when women wink they are likely to have a narrower view of who they wink at.

No. To a guy, a 'wink' from a woman is interpreted as: 'Hey, look over here, I think you may have overlooked my profile. Check it out and move forward if you care to.' Guys sending a 'wink' to a woman means: 'I'm scared of rejection. Please wink back if I can move forward without undue risk to my fragile ego.' Women find that weakness repulsive.

Agree with anon.

A wink from a women means she found someone she's interested in but doesn't want to make the first move. A wink from a guy means he's a wuss.

A wink from a woman is good. Mainly because it is rare for many women to initiate anything, let alone a wink. A man just doing a wink, instead of an e-mail, would be considered a wimp of a dating man. A woman doing a wink would be considered a brave initiator of a woman.

I think the main purpose it serves is when there is not an exact match in the 'compatability categories' (especially the ones that tend to be non-negotiable like age and height) but you still see something you like and are willing to give it a go. MAYBE the other person just happens to see it the same way.

Yo Amy!

Muslim men----hard core religious men tend to send me tons of messages despite the fact that it states in my profile I'm a FUCKING ATHEIST.

It has to do with the way I look. But since I'm not veiled, why the hell do they even bother?

Purplepen, it's not just Muslim men,

I spent an exciting weekend at Plenty Of Fish (PlentyOffish) had a profile that said I was Jewish, and got about a trillion messages from women that were some form of Christian and had marked down how incredibly important it was to them. I also said where I lived down to the zipcode, and got messages from women 20, 30, 40 miles away.

Anyway, PlentyOffish is a very strange site, if you even search for women that say they might be interested in essentially a one night stand, they allow other women to ignore you in their searches from then on.

There is a site I've had some fun with, though I haven't been there recently, and the deal there is, that winks are free, but messages cost money.

So a wink can be a free way of determining interest before signing up for a month of silliness in addition to somehow signalling if a man is a wimp or not.

I dunno, there is something about mistreating and showing disrespect to your customers by making BOTH parties on a dating site have to be paid members in order to exchange messages. But I guess it works for them, just like Ryan Air is also a pretty popular airline.

I just realized something, um, maybe I should be embarrassed.

You're not talking about anal winks, are you?

It's no more asymmetrical than dating in general... it is simply a way of a woman indicating she's not averse to the guy initiating an email. It's kinda nice in that way that getting a wink from a woman means you have .00000001% better of a chance of communication with her than just the cold call of sending out an email on an ad...

Because it's asymmetrical, it's stupid for a guy to do it, because it doesn't really initiate anything from his end. He has to make an ACTUAL move, which means an email in this case. From that perspective he has to expect that 99% of all his emails will not have any reply, IF he's lucky. I know people who have tried such sites that never got any email returns, and simply quit.

So there's no point asking about fairness, it is that way on purpose... you're the hunter, so hunt.

...as stupid as many (most?) women find winks from men?

No surprise there. One would expect most women to find "winks" from men to be stupid since women expect men to initiate things and I'm sure most women don't consider a "wink" to be a real first step.

Since men don't have that same expectation of women, it seems reasonable they wouldn't find "winks" from women to be stupid (or, if they do find them to be stupid, it would be for other reasons.)

When it's a stranger, even if he's just joking about something and not actually flirting with me, I tend to find it overly familiar.

But then, it's very seldom that I see men do that anyway, so I don't know how I'd feel about an old friend who did it.

Egads! I wouldn't know where to begin! I'm so glad I'm not in the dating pool!

(But if anything even happened to BF and me, I'd just email Cridmeister!)

....eveR happened!

Oh hell.

o.O

*****No. To a guy, a 'wink' from a woman is interpreted as: 'Hey, look over here, I think you may have overlooked my profile. Check it out and move forward if you care to.' Guys sending a 'wink' to a woman means: 'I'm scared of rejection. Please wink back if I can move forward without undue risk to my fragile ego.' Women find that weakness repulsive.*****

Nail, meet hammer.

For most men, any interest is good interest. Anon and SwissArmyD pretty much summed it up.

I wouldn't think past "Cool, she might be interested".

Back before electricity and the internet, we used to have BBS systems, which were just online messages and no graphics.

But these were local systems, so people could meet each other at monthly pizza parties for minimal investment, emotional and otherwise. I met a LOT of wonderful women that way, including the love of my life. It was better than internet dating because the meetings offered reality testing. There was no flying to Dallas with a heart full of rigid but fragile hopes to see what someone was like in person. The social circle was about more than romance, even if you had little in common with everyone else... People would help each other figure out who was who and what was what in a low-voltage way. Weirdnesses (and more serious social dangers) were mediated.

It's important to get away from the teenage stuff, y'know? I was thinking about this tune the other day, and how much I love it... And how much I hate the weeping-ninny words. It's one of the last classic rock and roll songs, but the childish lyrics make me ashamed to enjoy the techie metal mixdown so much.

If you're going to date, you gotta get over yourself. Even a loose collection of face-to-face friends can help you do that... But I'm not sure a professional dating service, online or otherwise, can offer that component.



Meanwhile....

> Oh hell.

Ever, even... Duzzenmadder. I'm here, and I'm waiting.

Pay sites often let unpaid members use the *wink* feature for free. Women tend to be the majority of no-paying members.

Sorry, I read the post wrong, didn't realize it was for online dating, I thought you meant winking in general, as in when you tell the mental patient, "Sure we'll make sure the troops at Waterloo are ready, Monsieur l'Empreror" as you wink to your fellow nurse.

Winks seem grandfatherly to me.

Because, Purplepen, they think you as a Western Woman would whore for them while they search for Mrs. Right.

The only ones I ever even kind of resented were the ones from women who were obvious non-contenders.

Don't throw hail marys.

Amy if you are looking for another side gig you should consider pimping people's profile for a fee. I honestly have no idea what majic string of words to put in there.

90% of the women's profiles read like they came off some template. I want to be in the 10%. A profile that's as fun to read as your columns would be gold and I bet the process is pretty similar to giving advice. Interview the person, get to know what's holding them back, write something witty, possibly with a made up word or two.

Yeah, I could see Amy being a force in the matchmaking business...

I'm seeing that part of the problem with "winks" is that, because they are so easy to do, they are like "likes" on Facebook: they don't mean much. Doesn't everyone have that overly-eager-to-please friend on Facebook who "likes" everything? It would not surprise me to hear of guys who go down the profile listings and "like" everything on the page. (Or better yet, write a Javascript to do it for them.) It's the same reason why dating services that charge for their service are usually more effective -- because the cost weeds out the people who aren't serious.