Dating can be tough. It can be especially tough if your personality is a mixture of petulance and insecurity. And even tougher if you think you can argue someone who’s not interested in you into a second date with an angry, accusatory, sometimes hilarious, sometimes deeply unsettling 1600-word email. And no, I’m not speaking hypothetically here.
The email in question, written by a young investment banker named Mike to an unfortunate woman named Lauren after one less-than-great date, was posted on Reddit a couple of days ago, and has already gotten a lot of internetty attention, but some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d give it a little fisking anyway. Settle in; it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride. (Note: What follows below is most of the email; I’ve cut out a few passages here and there.)
Hi Lauren,
I’m disappointed in you. I’m disappointed that I haven’t gotten a response to my voicemail and text messages.
Well, we’re off to a not-so-good start. Perhaps she is, as they say, just not that into you?
FYI, I suggest that you keep in mind that emails sound more impersonal, harsher, and are easier to misinterpret than in-person or phone communication. After all, people can’t see someone’s body language or tone of voice in an email. I’m not trying to be harsh, patronizing, or insulting in this email. I’m honest and direct by nature, and I’m going to be that way in this email.
Gosh, I wonder why Lauren didn’t get back to him.
By the way, I did a google search, so that’s how I came across your email.
Google-stalking – always a nice touch. There’s no better way to charm a nice lady than by tracking down her personal information online.
I assume that you no longer want to go out with me. (If you do want to go out with me, then you should let me know.) I suggest that you make a sincere apology to me for giving me mixed signals. I feel led on by you.
Uh, what? She’s ignoring you, dude. She doesn’t want to go out with you. Seems to me she’s sending you a pretty unmixed message here.
Should she have responded to your voicemail and/or texts? In an ideal world, perhaps, but she may have sensed that you’d react precisely how you’re reacting now, and didn’t want to have anything more to do with your creepy, entitled bullshit.
And now Mike the banker makes his, er, “case” for why she should go on a second date with him:
Things that happened during our date include, but are not limited to, the following:
-You played with your hair a lot. A woman playing with her hair is a common sign of flirtation. You can even do a google search on it. When a woman plays with her hair, she is preening. I’ve never had a date where a woman played with her hair as much as you did. In addition, it didn’t look like you were playing with your hair out of nervousness.
You were flirting!! Hair-twirling = sex! If you don’t realize it you can google search it!!!
-We had lots of eye contact during our date. On a per-minute basis, I’ve never had as much eye contact during a date as I did with you.
Eye contact is an Indicator of Interest. IOI! IOI! If you didn’t want to bear my children why did you look at me, with your eyes????
-You said, “It was nice to meet you.” at the end of our date. A woman could say this statement as a way to show that she isn’t interested in seeing a man again or she could mean what she said–that it was nice to meet you. The statement, by itself, is inconclusive.
Well, not really. This is what people say to be polite at the end of a disappointing date, when they don’t want to see you again. If she wanted to see you again, she would have said something about making plans for a second date.
-We had a nice conversation over dinner. I don’t think I’m being delusional in saying this statement.
We had a conversation! You did not flee in horror! Therefore you must have my babies!!!
In my opinion, leading someone on (i.e., giving mixed signals) is impolite and immature. It’s bad to do that.
And sending someone who clearly wants nothing to do with you a long, creepy, accusatory tirade is polite?
Normally, I would not be asking for information if a woman and I don’t go out again after a first date. However, in our case, I’m curious because I think our date went well and that there is a lot of potential for a serious relationship.
Dude, you do understand that she has to actually like you too in order for there to be a relationship?
I think we should go out on a second date. In my opinion, our first date was good enough to lead to a second date.
You cannot argue someone into a second date! That’s not how it works.
Why am I writing you? Well, hopefully, we will go out again. Even if we don’t, I gain utility from expressing my thoughts to you.
Gain utility? Really? DATING IS NOT MICROECONOMICS!
In addition, even if you don’t want to go out again, I would like to get feedback as to why you wouldn’t want to go again. Normally, I wouldn’t ask a woman for this type of feedback after a first date, but this is an exception given I think we have a lot of potential.
Well, banker dude. You’re getting some feedback now. All over the internet.
If you don’t want to go again, then apparently you didn’t think our first date was good enough to lead to a second date. Dating or a relationship is not a Hollywood movie. It’s good to keep that in mind. In general, I thought the date went well and was expecting that we would go out on a second date.
So your argument is that she should go out with you, even though she doesn’t want to go out with you, because life isn’t perfect and you’re probably the best she really deserves?
Way to sell yourself, dude.
If you’re not interested in going out again, then I would have preferred if you hadn’t given those mixed signals. I feel led on.
Well, she’s not really responsible for you thinking that every woman who twirls her hair in your presence wants to have your babies.
We have a number of things in common.
Oh dear, sounds like we’ve got another “logical” argument coming up here.
I’ll name a few things: First, we’ve both very intelligent. Second, we both like classical music so much that we go to classical music performances by ourselves. In fact, the number one interest that I would want to have in common with a woman with whom I’m in a relationship is a liking of classical music. I wouldn’t be seriously involved with a woman if she didn’t like classical music. You said that you’re planning to go the NY Philharmonic more often in the future. As I said, I go to the NY Philharmonic often. You’re very busy. It would be very convenient for you to date me because we have the same interests. We already go to classical music performances by ourselves. If we go to classical music performances together, it wouldn’t take any significant additional time on your part.
Um, what?
I have no clever remark to make here, other than that Lauren is probably going to have to avoid going to the Philharmonic ever again, on the off chance she might run into banker Mike.
According to the internet, you’re 33 or 32, so, at least from my point of view, we’re a good match in terms of age.
YOU ARE RIGHT AGE. INTERNET SAYS SO. THEREFORE YOU MUST DATE ME.
I could name more things that we have in common, but I’ll stop here. I don’t understand why you apparently don’t want to go out with me again. We have numerous things in common.
Also, you both require oxygen to live. Lauren, can’t you see that you and banker Mike are soulmates?
I assume that you find me physically attractive. If you didn’t find me physically attractive, then it would have been irrational for you to go out with me in the first place. After all, our first date was not a blind date. You already knew what I looked like before our date.
Banker Mike: You said you wanted feedback. Here is some feedback. She was apparently not horrified by your physical appearance. It may be your horrible personality that needs some work.
Perhaps, you’re unimpressed that I manage my family’s investments and my own investments. Perhaps, you don’t think I have a “real” job. Well, I’ve done very well as an investment manager. I’ve made my parents several millions of dollars. That’s real money. That’s not monopoly money. In my opinion, if I make real money, it’s a real job. Donald Trump’s children work for his company. Do they have “real” jobs? I think so. George Soros’s sons help manage their family investments. Do they have “real” jobs? I think so.
You’re fighting a losing battle here, dude. Just as you cannot argue someone into liking you, you cannot argue someone into being impressed that you manage your parents’ money.
In addition, I’m both a right-brain and left-brain man, given that I’m both an investment manager and a philosopher/writer.
And I’m the Queen of Denmark.
That’s a unique characteristic; most people aren’t like that. I’ve never been as disappointed and sad about having difficulty about getting a second date as I am with you.
Oy. As if this email wasn’t stalkerish enough already.
I’ve gone out with a lot of women in my life. (FYI, I’m not a serial dater. Sometimes, I’ve only gone out with a woman for one date.)
This last bit I have no trouble believing.
I suggest that we continue to go out and see what happens.
I suspect that Lauren has already played out various scenarios in her head already, and that none of them end well.
Needless to say, I find you less appealing now (given that you haven’t returned my messages) than I did at our first date. However, I would be willing to go out with you again. I’m open minded and flexible and am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. I wish you would give me the benefit of the doubt too.
So now you’re being noble and “open minded” for trying to pressure a woman who wants nothing to do with you into a second date?
If you don’t want to go out again, in my opinion, you would be making a big mistake, perhaps one of the biggest mistakes in your life.
Now you’re just making my skin crawl.
I spent time, effort, and money meeting you for dinner. Getting back to me in response to my messages would have been a reasonable thing for you to do. In addition, you arrived about 30 minutes late for our date. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if a man showed up thirty minutes late for a first date with you.
Here’s a solution, dude: How about she never goes on another date with you, ever. Then you won’t ever have to worry about her being late ever again.
If you’re concerned that you will hurt my feelings by providing specific information about why you don’t want to go with me again, well, my feeling are already hurt. I’m sad and disappointed about this situation. If you give information, at least I can understand the situation better. I might even learn something that is beneficial.
I hope you find the feedback that the internet has now provided you to be helpful.
If you don’t want to go out again, that I request that you call me and make a sincere apology for leading me on (i.e., giving me mixed signals).
Now we’re back on this again.
In my opinion, you shouldn’t act that way toward a man and then not go out with him again. It’s bad to play with your hair so much and make so much eye contact if you’re not interested in going out with me again.
Damn you, foul strumpet, and your devious hair-playing ways! Google it! GOOGLE IT!!!
I would like to talk to you on the phone.
I think you’ve pretty much guaranteed that this will never, ever happen.
Even if you don’t want to go out again, I would appreciate it if you give me the courtesy of calling me and talking to me. Yes, you might say things that hurt me, but my feelings are already hurt. Sending me an email response (instead of talking on the phone) would better than no response at all, but I think it would be better to talk on the phone. Email communication has too much potential for misinterpretation, etc.
Not much to misinterpret here, Mike. You’ve made it absolutely crystal clear that you’re an undateable creep.
Let me be serious for a moment. Forget about Lauren. Hell, forget about women in general for a while, and work on yourself. Get some therapy; you can afford it. Work through your bitterness, your petulance, your highly unattractive mixture of entitlement and insecurity. Stop being a “Nice Guy” and learn to be genuinely nice.
And don’t ever, ever, ever write another email like this one.
Monsieur sans Nom, totally busted! Not just a faker, but a dumb one.
OK, that’s funny. He was diagnosed and immediately received treatment the very first year in which the syndrome was officially recognised, you guys. He is Patient Zero.
Meanwhile my bestie was definitely being investigated as possibly autistic as a small child, but didn’t get a real diagnosis till her teens, even with a social worker for a mother. She’s 25.
@zhinxy, yeah, people noticed I was…off…as a kid, but no one even suggested aspergers until I was an adult (my older sister watched a documentary and told me that she had seen “a thing on TV about people like you”). And I am relatively young (22) and even had symptoms in early childhood which, minus the high verbal/early reader stuff, would have fit a classic autism diagnosis (I refused to be held as early as 18 months, self injured by rocking and banging my head on the wall, sensitivity to light and certain sounds, triggers with a number of other sensory things, etc.) I still occasionally have times when I get sensory overload and break down and spend several days sitting in a dimly lit space only eating toast and drinking milk or water. Granted, I grew up in a poor rural area and had a mother who was paranoid about ADD and other mental health diagnoses in children, but it’s not too hard to slip through the cracks with aspergers or high functioning autism even now.
I have a lot of “classic autism” too, despite being nearly hyperlexic as a kid which threw everybody off… I can be extremely good at masking though, like a lot of girl aspies I studied the hell out of drama and can keep a persona going like crazy when I’m doing well… (Which, when you add the PSTD is… not, for a while now, though I think it’s getting better) I studied about as many art expression books and drama class videos as I could without even a clue that my need to try and understand what the hell was with these facial expression thingys would have made me autistic for YEARS. I got diagnosed and then undiagnosed with ADD about jillion times. Confession… actually just did the hurt yourself headbanging thing today. It was a good run without doing it though. Heh. Ah, the life of functioning highly…
I read a New York Times Magazine article about Asperger’s, showed it to my mother, and she immediately started crying. I had no idea why, at first. It was my sophomore year in college, 2002.
This one.
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000610/msgs/37688.html
And it was either 2001 or 2002, I don’t remember.
LOL @ Butthurt Bostonian
NO U!
Why ride the French name when you’re only language is lesser troll?
*your
very sick
This troll tastes stale, it’s showing no creativity or imagination. Are you sure it hasn’t been chewed up and regurgitated before? David, an IP address check please, would be useful. Over on the current thread it has been challenged to shave its nethers to demonstrate that it isn’t a hypocritical turd displaying sexist double standards and has fallen flat on the job, so putting it out of its misery would probably be the humane course of action at this stage.
@Bagelsan,
I think there’s something to your analysis, but you are missing something. PUA orthodoxy also says that you should “next” (i.e. abort your seduction and find someone else) quickly if you get no response, and most certainly never to “blame women” or send long emails like the one in the OP, as such behaviors are clearly “displays of low value”. The idea is that “you are the prize”, and long, passive-aggressive argumentation works counter to that. You don’t argue people into accepting a gift[1], you give it to someone else who appreciates it. If you need to argue, the gift clearly has no worth to the intended recipient, and that thought is toxic to game.
There is an obvious trade-off — the PUA needs to invest himself, but not too much, and there is some room for interpretation, but the behavior in the OP is actually exactly what pick up strongly argues against. If the guy really thinks that he is doing something ‘PUA approved’, he’s basing it on one-and-a-half posts by an idiot like Roissy, at most.
@Voip: My mother sent me the Newsweek article about asperger’s with an OMG THIS IS YOU! (I’m 56). My partner read it, and said, OMG yes. I got the book the article referenced, and Entwife and I both read it, and well, yeah, it seems likely. I’ve not had the time to track down a specialist and work with them–though I’ve heard that one of the Psychology profs on campus has the diagnostic tests — but I mean to someday. I have learned over the past few decades to mimic some behaviors that I could never see the point of when young (I would just walk up to somebody and start talking about what we’d last been talking about–I could remember it? why waste time with “hello how are you”). But even so–I was happy to move online for teaching because I had problems with classes–especially the “look at them and know they’ve learned X” (I have had lots of discussions with colleagues who dislike online or the idea of online teaching, and say that “I can’t tell if they’ve learned something unless I see their faces.” Since I could never see it, I prefer to look at their work. Maybe next spring I can find out the diagnostic dude’s name and track him down…
Okay, here is a challenge: Can anyone think of ANY personality flaw or idiosyncrasy that’s not associated with SOME medical pathology that can’t be slapped on it? I sure can’t. I mean, autism is pretty much a catch-all. A minority, I suppose, are covered by paranoid schizophrenia. No, seriously, think about:
Like to write? Why, you’ve got hypergraphia, which is associated with a number of mental disorders.
Have fewer than a dozen best friends? Don’t like to “mingle” at parties? Autism, clearly.
Enjoy Dylan Thomas’ poetry? No one can understand that shit, so: autism.
Really smart and interested in intellectual subjects from a young age? Autism.
Don’t care for small talk? Autism.
Really verbose? Autism.
Think everyone is beneath you? Autism.
Really good at taking tests? Autism.
Really bad at taking tests? Autism.
Really, the list is endless. What I don’t understand is the reason for this powerful desire in our society to medicalize so much of human behavior and experience.
Ah, yes, now it is being discussed that I might be a Holocaust denier and apologist. For some strange reason I find that kind of hard to believe…since I have Jewish family members (e.g my own grandmother). Ya…A Jewish girl and an Irish catholic guy as grandparents. I also have Jewish cousins and a few Jewish in laws.
So ya…not a holocaust apologist.
Also, only had time to skim over the comments, but someone made a Hitler comparison to a single rapist. Ya, Hitler is in his own separate group that only includes him and the head Nazi’s. So…bad comparison.
The only one butthurt is Monsieur sans Nom. I just thought it was funny to point out the obvious. I notice no response to the ones who verified the extreme unlikeliness of the diagnosis.
Brandon, you could write an encyclopedia sized book about how not to answer direct questions.
Me:
Caraz:
Bee:
Brandon: No one said you were a holocaust denier/apologist. They compared those who are to you. You are a rape/abuse apologist.
One who refuses to admit to his own words (in multiple instances), and won’t answer simple questions.
So the evidence of thousands of your words say it’s cupidity, stupidity, or trepidity.
Pony up, or take your pick: those are the options.
Actually I daresay that NamelessDudeBro is talking out his ass. You may not realise it RocketFrog but he pretends to know things he doesn’t, and makes up things like the emails being fake. Pretending that someone fabricated these e-mails, as well as his having personal knowledge of various other things; which he posts to manboobz to that he can have a good laughing at.
@Kyrie: I think it is depends on the situation. When one willingly does something that is provoking, one can not go back and say “well, I didn’t do anything!”
If a man is burning an American flag during a July 4 parade, I doubt most people would feel sympathetic towards him if a crowd of spectators attacked him. It would clearly be a case of “if you didn’t want to get attacked, you probably shouldn’t be waving a burning flag around on the Fourth of July”
The same if a white man was walking around Harlem screaming the N-word. Few people would have sympathy towards him. By behaving that way, he is bringing it on himself since if he wasn’t screaming the N-word he would have a much lower chance of being attacked. The key variable is him being racist vs just walking around Harlem.
Rape is more complicated since the variables are often subtle or unknown. I think my view is one that a lot of men share, in that the rapist is 100% at fault for committing the crime, but that women can change certain behavior to further minimize the risk of becoming a victim again.
I find it hard to believe that women have no options in preventing rape. Clothing, owning a gun, moving to safer cities, etc… I am not saying what will work and what wouldn’t, just that there has to be something besides feminists chanting “men don’t rape”.
Like a rapist actually cares about your slogan. Saying that “men are the only ones that can prevent rape” is as absurd as “gun laws keep guns out of the hands of criminals (the same group of people that don’t give a shit about laws)”. (FYI: The cities with the most restrictive gun control have more gun crimes per capita (e.g Dallas vs Chicago))
“I find it hard to believe that women have no options in preventing rape. Clothing, owning a gun, moving to safer cities, etc… I am not saying what will work and what wouldn’t…
Of course! Why would you have compassion or introspection, or even the inkling of anyone else having those things?
Brandon, you realize you just compared hypothetical examples of people purposefully inciting anger and hatred to…women being women in public, right?
@Caraz: And you’ll notice that all his hypothetics seem to be men–i.e. man burning flag, white man in Harlem; recently if a man came home and found his wife cheating on him……not that I want him using hyypotheticals with women, but it’s telling that he defaults to MEN.
Thing is, Brandon, this actually isn’t possible:
Brandon: @Kyrie: I think it is depends on the situation. When one willingly does something that is provoking, one can not go back and say “well, I didn’t do anything!”
What discussions of feminism are legitimately provoking of violence.