lizi
Posts: 4673
Joined: 2/1/2009
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MDomCouple
First, let me admit that this is coming from the perspective of a man getting messages from other men. So, that said, I completely understand that things may be different for women.
But, all of that aside, even when I was on more vanilla personals sites I always answered every email I got. I did that for two reasons. Primarily, I did it because I didn't like the feeling of being ignored when I was the one putting myself out there to make contact with someone. To me, being ignored was a cheap way out for other person.
Which, leads me to the second reason I always replied. It is a cheap way out because when you ignore an email, you don't have to deal with the fact that there is a real, living, feeling person on the other end. Sure, some of those people might be psychos who will just send a hateful reply when you say you aren't interested. But, for each one of those, I have found that there is another out there who will take a polite rejection quite well, and for whom being ignored is painful. I would rather ignore the hateful messages from the psychos, who would likely get mad anyway for not being taken up on their offers, than to potentially hurt the nice people who simply want their presence acknowledged.
When I left the other sites and joined CM, I brought that mentality with me. Though I haven't been here long, I have found it has worked quite well for me. 
I used to feel this way, that there was another person out there who deigned to take time out of their day to send me a message and then time, volume, and attitude wore me down from responding on a regular basis. Men may not understand what the sheer volume of mail is like for a woman on an adult site. Men outnumber women by a large margin on that type of site and they are generally not as specific about what they're looking for. So Mr. Iwantarelationship may have a LT relationship as his goal, but he'll take any casual encounters that come his way too. Women are generally more discriminating and look more for something LT. This has the effect that even if the gender numbers were balanced, there would be a much larger volume of mail going out from the men.
As a woman, getting the bazillion letters saying "Hi, how are you?" and then answering them, and always finding out at some point that you are being contacted solely for sex has made me very jaded about receiving mail here. Anytime now that a man contacts me outside of the forums I will almost assume it's for sex and I'm pretty much always right. Therefore I ignore email at times. Men get very testy and purport that the "Hi, how are you?" emails are just trying to 'get to know' a woman here, but really they want sex and that comes out. Forgive me if I don't feel like 'getting to know you' when I know you want something from me I'm not prepared to give. A caveat, this does not apply to the men I've had contact with from the forums- they generally are about getting to know me.
This hasn't even included the nasty responses to "No thank you," yet and boy do those suck. You can brush off a couple of them and with time and sheer number it gets really disheartening to be told nasty things over and over. As the recipient of the unasked for emails you become very wary of saying anything at all because you'll just get more abuse in return. We've done threads on the forums before on this subject and it seems to happen across the board to the women much more then the men ever think it does. I suppose the men get tired of being rejected, Im sure the uneven gender ratio comes into play here, and they lash out from their frustration.
In the end OP do what you like as you'll never win - so please yourself. There will always be those who say it's bad manners not to reply and they are not really familiar with what happens negatively when you do. There were times when I was looking that I elected to hide my profile because I just couldn't stand the vitriol being launched at me anymore. I did usually elect to respond to my emails then and now with many fewer of them I still generally elect to respond with the no thanks, but there are times I'm just tired of feeling like a punching bag and I delete unread or say nothing.
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