Stop Trying: Flirting on AIM

Overuse of emoticons

Your goddamn text expresses more emotion than all the smiley faces in the goddamn world. Part of trying to inter-flirt comes with respecting the person you’re talking to; forcing a visualization of your mood down their throat with every exchange isn’t particularly respectful. It is, however, incredibly annoying. 

Idling breeds clinginess

It’s easy to confuse the etiquette rules of online conversations with real life ones. In reality, you’d be more than offended if the person you were previously having a conversation with simply walked away, mid-sentence, without another word. You’d be irritated, and you’d probably yell at them to come back. 

Don’t do that on AIM.  

Just because some girl you’ve been trying to inter-fuck decided to get a drink does not give you the right to badger her eight hundred times in the span of two minutes simply because she didn’t think your constant repetitions of “ur myspace pic is hot” warranted her staying at the computer for another twenty minutes. 

Abbreviations

Internet chat is not texting. The keys are less than an inch away from each other, so there’s no excuse not to type out words like “to” or “you.”  

If you’re trying to flirt with someone over AIM, you’re obviously failing from the start, but know that decent grammar is far more rare, and therefore far more impressive on the internet than the ability to type 200 sort-of words per second. 

A profile of desperation

An AIM profile, not unlike a MySpace page, says a lot about you. If it’s sparse, people will assume you’re boring; if it’s ridiculously cluttered, horribly organized, and far too long, people will assume you’re insane. 

Online, it is better to be thought boring than insane. Anyone with a profile even remotely resembling the one above should be publicly executed, and especially not flirted with.  

Direct connecting

In the world of instant messaging, attempting to direct connect with someone, without provocation, is the real-world equivalent of whipping out your penis at a dance club, pointing it in the direction of a woman you’re hitting on, and raising your eyebrows suggestively.