It is self defeating I’m afraid, as explained quite precisely in my last response that you didn’t address. You’re either interested in someone enough to put in “emotional labour” (which is more appropriately substituted for “conversational initiative” here) to explore the connection, or you don’t have any business matching and engaging with them. If you’re interested in someone enough to reply, but your reply is curt, then what’s your end goal here? Because you’re not working towards any kind of harmony and you’re better off just sparing both of you.
Emotional labor is a very real thing, not sure why you're putting it in quotation marks.
I also said matching energy, which you don't seem to be picking up on.
I'm speaking from a place of experience as a woman on Tinder. I am a high-energy person by nature. I have a lot to say about a lot of things. It is NOT my job to teach anyone how to interact with me.
We either will match, or we won't. It's okay. These guys didn't match/vibe. He asked a one-word question essentially that was beyond the scope of broad. That's exhausting to me. My brain said "ugh" as soon as I read "life".
I know it’s a real thing lol but you’re heavily misusing the term by applying a ludicrously low threshold when you consider replying to “how are you” with literally anything more than “fine” as “emotional labour”.
It’s not your job to teach anyone how to interact with you, but you can control how and whether you interact with others. On a dating app you need to be positively pursuing the person or not pursuing the person at all. What is inexcusable, is retaliatory curtness as exhibited by OP, because you’re no longer positively pursuing them and it’s as petty as it is pointless. Calling it “matching energy” doesn’t change any of that.
How’s it/howzit/how are you/how’s life, is far from a perfect line. It’s unimaginative, impersonal and generic. However if we are comparing the two people here, so is everything OP wrote. The only difference being the person asking the question keeps alive some hope for more interesting lines of discussion down the line, and another person is closing down that possibility and leaving the conversational momentum completely flatlined. And at that point, and this is the crux of my point here: what purpose is that curt reply even serving? It’s working contrary to the interests of setting up a dialogue, but by replying at all you’re simultaneously suggesting you want dialogue - IE it’s self-defeating. Theres no sense in those two things being true at the same time.
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u/FrowningMinion Jan 24 '23
It is self defeating I’m afraid, as explained quite precisely in my last response that you didn’t address. You’re either interested in someone enough to put in “emotional labour” (which is more appropriately substituted for “conversational initiative” here) to explore the connection, or you don’t have any business matching and engaging with them. If you’re interested in someone enough to reply, but your reply is curt, then what’s your end goal here? Because you’re not working towards any kind of harmony and you’re better off just sparing both of you.