Have you ever checked your inbox more than twice a day, hoping to get a reply from that hot girl you emailed? How about more than every 2 hours? How about every 15 minutes? Don't worry, it's happened to most of us guys at some point... and we never figure out why. We've got a good online dating profile and a flattering photo, but still... no replies.

Why doesn't that hot girl write you back?

Let's start by looking at the average email a guy sends a girl on an online dating website. Now, I'm not accusing you of writing one of these, but just in case you *might* have, we should take a quick look. It goes something like:

"Hi, I saw your profile and you are really cute! I like your hat in that picture, it's really nice, where did you get it? Anyway, come take a look at my profile and if you like what you see, email me!"

This email can be broken down into three parts. Bad. Badder. Baddererest.

Sentence 1: Bad

The last thing a girl who gets 50 emails a day wants to read is another average guy saying another average thing. Also, ban "cute" from your vocabulary. Cute is so bland and overused, it barely has any meaning to women anymore. Besides, women want to be beautiful. Not cute. Ask them!

Sentence 2: Badder

"I like your hat" is a good example of the bad online dating advice given out by MSN and Yahoo! online dating "experts". They say "find something in her profile or photo and ask her about it." That's great if you want to be her friend, but it doesn't make any kind of connection, so forget it. I'll tell you what to ask about in a minute when I'm done having my fun tearing apart this bad email.

Sentence 3: Baddererest (yes it's a word... at least it is now!)

Just a well educated guess, but I'd say 80% of bad emails to girls end with "come take a look at my profile and if you like what you see, email me." What's wrong with that? First, everyone does it. Second, you need to end your email with a command, not a suggestion! Salesmen and marketers call it a "call to action", like "BUY NOW!" You don't need to go that heavy, but realistically, anything commanding and interesting is better than a passive "if you like what you see..." You'd be better off ending it with "rabid monkeys are eating my fingers as I type, email me back or they'll finish me off!" Actually, I kind of like that one. Feel free to try it out.

Thus ends our "Anatomy of a Bad Email" lesson...

Now let's make a good email!

The most important online dating advice I can give you is... BE INTERESTING! Most guys write the same boring stuff over and over. If you really want to blow her away, try a combination of these two:

1) Have a sense of humor 2) Be insightful

Point 1: How to have a sense of humor

You want to learn how to write funny emails? First, read her profile up and down, back and forth. Pick out something that is completely unique to this girl, and ignore all the stuff she's written that you've seen already in dozens of other women's dating profiles.

Example: She says, "I'm smart, funny, unique, love baseball, study medicine, and also work on a chicken farm."

Forget everything but the chicken farm. The chicken farm makes her unique! Try to let your brain come up with the craziest, funniest observations you can. You might write something like:

"A chicken farm? I love chicken! We'd be the perfect couple... You could poach extra chickens from work and I could fence them on the chicken black market. Eventually we could build up a nest egg and flee the coup to sunny Chichen Itza!"

Wow, that's a bad set of puns, even for me. Anyway, you get the picture. You are touching on what makes her unique, the little point that most guys ignore in order to go for the easy and mundane stuff like "I like your hat." Picking out the unique points alone will get her attention, and having a sense of humor about them will win her over.

Point 2: How to be insightful

Guys don't really read profiles. Sure, we skim them over a couple times and look for points to talk about, but we don't read between the lines. We don't really look for the depth of her words, the subtext of what she is really saying... what she is really asking for. What am I talking about? Let's go right to an example.

Here's a section of a woman's profile:

"I've been here before, perhaps too many times, each time a little more jaded. If only we could be more honest with each other, the world would be a better place. I'm looking for a guy who is kind, faithful, and sincere."

Is she saying she is looking for a kind, faithful, sincere guy?

Only on the surface. What she is really telling us is...

"I've been hurt by men."

How did I get that out of the above paragraph? Re-read what she's saying: she's come back time after time, even more jaded, which means she's gone through numerous relationships, each of them having ended badly. She's wishing for more honesty, which means she's faced a lot of deceit. And she's looking for a guy who is kind, faithful and sincere, which heavily suggests that she knows what she wants because she's done time with a lot of guys who have been unkind, unfaithful, and insincere to her.

So, I see this profile and I see a girl who has been hurt, and I know that she will respond to a guy who is kind, faithful and sincere? So is that how I present myself?

*NO!*

I'm going to do even better. There's a guy that she'll respond to way more readily than the above guy... a guy who UNDERSTANDS HER! Forget everything about what women say they want on the surface! Deep down... they want to be understood (we all do really). Being a guy who understands who she really is and sympathizes with her is much more powerful and rare.

To address that, I would write something like:

"I read your profile and couldn't help but feel a twinge of sadness at your words. We all seek happiness in life, but disappointment certainly seems to find its way in often enough. Like you, I simply seek a bright sunny day in a cloudy world."

I don't confront her issues directly of course, a subtle brush is all it takes to get her attention and let her know that the potential is there. This would certainly get her attention away from the guys who write "I'm sincere, honest, and faithful." You know... the same guys that hurt her in the past?

There are many other techniques to get a girl's attention in an email, but these two also demonstrate the valuable traits of humor and insightfulness, which will make you much more attractive to her. Pick out the little unique gem in her profile and make it shine with humor. Read deep into the subtext of her profile, and sympathize with it. She'll email you back.

What... you thought it would be as simple as writing "Hey baby, what's up?" :)

Cheers and happy dating!

Dylan Alexander