How to Respond to Dating Site Messages, Winks, and Filrts

I can think of only three totally-free dating sites, where there's no charge to search and view profiles, or send and receive messages.

The others demand money before members' profiles can be viewed, members contacted, or messages received. Gold, silver, and bronze levels of membership are offered. (Aaah, the everlasting legacy of the Olympic Games.) Full access can cost as much as fifty dollars per month.

All of them, including the free sites, ask the curious visitor to complete and submit a profile before he or she can do anything. The multiple-choice items are easy, but it's the essay questions -- "tell us a little about yourself" and "describe your ideal mate" -- that can be troublesome. Ask any writer: it's not easy to turn out a couple hundred words about yourself that make sense, and thus do a good job of selling you to a prospective Mr. or Ms. Perfect, without a lot of editing.

Anyone who contacts someone else on a dating site -- even a free one -- has put some effort, if not cash, into the process.

So don't they deserve an answer?

Threads on message boards reveal that some members have sent as many as three hundred messages, winks, virtual hugs, and virtual bouquets of flowers, and received exactly zero responses. There aren't many sites where that can be done for free. Some of these guys paid a lot of money to be ignored.

And ignoring people, in most circles, is still just plain rude.

Even a simple "I don't think we would click, but thank you for writing" is better than nothing. It took me five seconds to write that and, once saved in a Word document, would require about a minute to be copied, pasted, and e-mailed with the sender's user name ("Dear Evilvixxen666") added to the salutation. Less than that if I had a fast connection.

Send something. Ladies, give the URL of your Webcam ("triple w dot imhotandyournot dot com"). Guys . . . I'm not sure what guys might send. I would throw in a line edit of the profile as a sample of my proofreading and editing services, along with my rates. The woman would learn that "your" and "you're" are not interchangeable, and neither are to and too; and that "loves Harley's" is grammatically ambiguous. As written, it's a possessive, not a plural. What about Harley do you love, I would rhetorically ask and, if that's the status quo, why are you looking for his replacement?