📋 The Wednesday Diagnosis: Somewhere Right Now, One Person Has Sent the Same Sentence to a Dozen Strangers and Is Wondering Why Romance Hasn't Happened Yet.

Let me describe the pattern I spotted this week — anonymised, as always — because once you see it, you'll never un-see it.

Someone signs up on a dating platform. They compose a message. It's polite! It's flattering! It includes a gendered compliment ("hey beautiful" or "hey handsome"), a vague reference to having seen the other person's profile, and a courteous sign-off. So far, so reasonable. But then — instead of sending that message to one person and waiting for a response, they open the next profile, paste the same message, send, open the next profile, paste, send, next profile, paste, send. Ten, twelve, fifteen times. Same words. Same order. Same punctuation. Same everything.

It's not a conversation starter. It's a mail merge.

And here's what makes it different from Monday's "hey" epidemic: "hey" is lazy but at least it's honest about being lazy. Nobody thinks "hey" was custom-crafted. But a copy-paste message pretends to be personal. It wears the costume of effort. It has the structure of a real message — a greeting, a compliment, a reason for writing. And that costume is exactly why it feels worse when you realise it was sent to everyone. Because you weren't special. You were just... next on the list. 📋