When I embarked on this dating adventure initially, I promised myself that I was going to honor the Gods of Dating Karma™ by doing the kind and honorable thing whenever confronted with the need for politely rejecting someone. I told myself that no one likes the brush-off method and that people would rather just be told straight up that I'm not interested.
But was I wrong?
I was reading in another blog recently that not responding to an email from a party that you're not interested in is the best way to go. That no one wants to receive a "thanks but no thanks" email back and that they'd rather get nothing at all. I always thought that I was being considerate by sending a "no thanks" email, but when I thought about it more I realized that I received more negative responses to those emails than I would have received had I done nothing at all.
Then today, in my state of mild boredom, I was reading over Constant Dater's old posts and found a particularly interesting one featuring her take on dating etiquette.
Constant states that it's perfectly acceptable, nay, preferable for someone to use the Unreturned Phone Call / Email as a method of getting the point of rejection across. And you know what? At this point, I'm inclined to start to agree with her. I don't know if anyone remembers this rejection, but it still breaks my heart every time I think about it.
So is she right? Is that really the best way to go when matters of the heart are concerned? What do you guys think?
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"Manners, ain't nothing wrong with having manners. Show respect and some courtesy." Third World Manners
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2 comments:
I was under the impression that proper etiquette is to send a no thank you and tried it for a while. Eventually it got to be a lot of work and I gave up.
The biggest downside to the no-rejection route is that some of the guys seem to assume this means I just didn't get their message, that it's lost out in cyberspace, and they send me several more messages that pile up until I finally have to send a "no thanks" (which is often then met with hostility). At least it weeds out the freaks, I guess.
If the guy was nice and had good manners during your date, I believe the right thing to do is to send a courtesy reply. Keeping people hanging is just bloody immature. It just shows a lack of respect on your part.
Of course if the guy doesn't stop after that email, then you have full liberty to ignore/block him out.
I am surprised at the excuses which people (both men and women) come up with for their bad manners.
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