Editor's note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book "Stuff Hipsters Hate." When they're not trolling Brooklyn for new material, Ehrlich works as a senior writer at MTV, and Bartz is a news editor at Psychology Today. Got a question about etiquette in the digital world? Contact them at netiquette@cnn.com.
(CNN) -- Last week, we penned a public service announcement demonstrating a few of the ways you can guarantee a nonresponse in an initial online dating message, no matter the quality of your profile or personality.
While we received a fair amount of gratitude (mostly from online daters tired of finding such hapless missives in their inboxes), we also received many a request for tips on what to write in a successful first note. (One humanity-loving reader also took the time to inform us he suspects we are "two former high school cheerleaders who now have an inferiority complex," a flattering if inaccurate assumption that we were once capable of killer herkies and immense pep.)
While it's infinitely more fun to tell you what not to do than it is to give you helpful pointers (hey, the Ten Commandments weren't written in the negative for nothin'), this week we're heeding your call.
Before we proceed with the advice-shilling, though, a big disclaimer looms. Even if you write an excellent first letter, there is no guarantee that the recipient will write you back. If there were a magic formula, some genius would have cracked it by now.
Every online dater has had the experience of reading an impossibly sweet, heart-bursting message and thinking, "Oh, sigh, I wish we could use this site to arrange dates for our friends or make new totally platonic acquaintances, because the sender of this message is clearly a lovely person. Alas. [hits delete]."
This is simply part of the numbers game that is dating (online and in real life), and it's the reason online courtship is not for those with rickety self-esteem and hair-trigger rejection sensitivity. Because most of your messages will go unanswered, doesn't mean there's anything wrong about you. (Certainly you're brimming with foibles, but your intended date doesn't necessarily know that yet.)
