On Questionmark Avatars and Argonians

I just made friends with a question mark avatar with no profile description to speak of. He sent me a two-line message, but it was a *good* message. And, like no question mark avatar that’s ever existed before, he’s helping me finish a book. This doesn’t work in my favour. I’ve written more than my fair share of derisive posts about empty profiles.

There’s always an exception to cut your hypothesis in two.

Over the last seven years, question mark avatars have invited me out to coffee. They’ve asked for sexy photos. They’ve tried to arrange hook-ups and made thinly veiled requests for wank fodder. What they *don’t* usually do is share anything about themselves. What's personality? A kind of DDOS attack?

Women are not that complicated. We have jobs. We have pets to take care of and friends to see. We have approximately six hours left to spare from our work weeks, so we don’t waste them on asking questions of internet strangers who haven't given us any hint of who they are. It’s less about the fact that you’ve brought us an empty profile, and more about the fact that you’re too unmotivated to fill it out.

That empty black page tells me a hundred things about your character. Those things might be true, and they might not, but until you indicate otherwise, this is what your blank profile description says:

“I’m a chancer who’s unwilling to put any effort whatever into the people I want to play with. I feel *so* strongly about bringing nothing to the table that I’ve sat with an empty profile for *four years* and not once felt moved to fill it out. Just bring your vagina along on our date, and I’ll be happy. Anyway, I sent you a “hiiii” which is all you need to clear away a couple of hours out of your schedule to meet me. By the way, the complete lack of fucks I’ve demonstrated here leaks into all areas of my life. I dropped out of school due to perpetual disinterest, and now I mostly just hang out in my gaming chair all day. I don’t even have enough energy to level up my Skyrim Argonian more than twice, but shit. Was that a dragon I just heard?”

I’ve confronted a couple of empty profiles in my time, and they’ve all told me they’ll answer any questions I have, so no problemo. The trouble is that you’re the ones asking for my attention, not the other way around. I'm not going to write back unless you motivate me to, even if that entails asking you who you are and what you love. My Skyrim Argonian needs levelling up, so I just don't have the time to drag information out of faceless digital entities.

Fetlife is a highly competitive space for heterosexual men. Women receive enough unsolicited messages to fill a set of encyclopedias. You have to bring an actual personality to her inbox. As a gender, we’re really into hooking up with people who take the time to connect with us, but maybe it’s more important that you go kill that dragon.

Unfortunately, we need to make the time to kill it, too, so we prefer responding to men who have profile descriptions.