spell check

On my online dating profile, I list my minimal qualifications:

1. Can you name three states and their capitals?
2. Can you tie your shoes and talk at the same time?
3. Have you finished a book since middle school?

Of course, I'm being silly with these, but it provides an easy way for potential suitors to initiate an email response. I have such a hard time figuring how to start out an email to a stranger, and figured guys do too. So I help them out a bit.

I recently got an email from a guy who wrote:


Let's see... Minnesota - M, Wisconsin - W, Iowa - I. I love that youre a prof and I caught this!




(emphasis in original). He included the "spell-check" graphic. And the missing apostrophe was his. Clearly, he thought I had misspelled "capital," and that I should have had "three states and their capitols" on my profile. Which is wrong.

I wrote back, "I'm not sure what you 'caught.' A word used in more than one way? I can do that too. You say you like to run. For what? Park board? Senate?"

He wrote back an email espousing all his levels of education and that in fact he never learned that "capital" meant currency, letters, AND cities and that "capitol" was used solely for buildings. Then he went on to tell me all about his running and that in fact he was on his condo board and blah blah blah. I should have been more clear that I didn't actually care about the questions I asked. So I responded:

"Look, I wasn't asking those questions to encourage any more communication. The kind of person whose initial response is to point out others' errors is not the kind of person I would choose to spend any time with, particularly a partner. This is made all the more pathetic because what led you to believe you were so superior was, in fact, wrong. Perhaps you should take this into consideration in future correspondence with women on this site. I'll bet you won't get far being sarcastic, superior, and ignorant."

Harsh, I know. And I was pretty sarcastic in my two emails; fight fire with fire I guess. I probably shouldn't have engaged at all. But I got pretty worked up about a guy thinking that his was the kind of initial email that would make women interested in him. It didn't matter that he was wrong. (Ok, it kind of did). What mattered was that the first thing he thought to do was to point to fault.

Next!