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Thursday November 16 2017 - To reply or not?	Some thoughts
This is a common discussion I get when I talk to some wrestlers I've met along the way. People tell me that I'm nice and that I seem to wrestle just about every one. Truth is that I try to give everybody a chance. Not everyone will share my way of thinking... You can't be a match to everybody and you'll sometimes meet wrestlers that absolutely want to wrestle you, but you don't really want to wrestle them... so how do you handle them? Sometimes, just telling them that you're not interested is plain easy and it ends there. It sounds pretty easy in theory. In practice, it's not that simple. I met a guy who was a teacher in psychology and he told me that you have about two types of people that handle rejection: 1) You have the guy with low self-esteem that will be extremely hurt and that will say to himself: "Nobody wants me, I must be hideous. I'll go hide in my corner." If you are a good judge of character and can identify a person with an insecure personality from a face pic, then you'd be able to make the right decision for someone affected with case 1. But this ain't easy. Most likely, a person with personality one won't have a face pic because of his low self-esteem to start with. I guess that's why many wrestlers require that a face pic is posted on a profile before they can reply. Let's take a look at case two: 2) You have the complete opposite over confident guy that will say to himself: "That's fine. There's plenty of fish out there and there are many people who will appreciate me the way I am." Well, problem solved if the rejection recipient is this type of guy. Life goes on and you didn't hurt anyone, nor did he hurt you. That example above is a bit exaggerated, so let's put also in that category the group of people that understands your response, thanks you for your honesty and moves on quietly. Whether it falls in category 1 or 2, many wrestlers don't want to accidentally hurt the person on the opposite end. It also goes in hand with what my mother uses to tell me: "If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all." With experience, you quickly learn there are actually more than two cases. So let me expand the initial two cases by creating two new ones: 3) The third case would be the persistent guy that will keep on messaging you anyway even if you said "No". The solution to this is simple, this is where you don't need to reply any further. You said it the first time, you don't need to repeat it again. This also sounds simple but in reality you have the really really persistent ones. There's a block button for that but I met some users who don't want to block in case the person on the other end ends up in anger and retaliates. This actually leads to the fourth case: 4) There's the extreme case where you fall on a psycho that will not accept rejection and will threaten you. Now this leaves a mark and sometimes a permanent trauma. With today's problems about revenge porn, identity theft and impersonation, with search engines making it easier to track down people and with the increasing cases of hacking worldwide, it may be the reason why many people still don't want to include their faces in their pictures or even reply to someone by saying "Not interested." They don't need to over-analyze whether someone falls in category one, two or three... the risk of falling in category 4 is enough for them to not reply at all when they are not interested. I can understand them myself a little bit: I remember saying to someone that I didn't think our personalities would match for a second encounter and his reply was pretty frightening. Yes, I can just hit the delete button, or even better in my case, delete his profile (although this would be abusing my administrative powers, but that's another story). So, I can understand the impact for someone who is clueless in technology and fears the retaliation of another user. Similarly to the four types of users who handle rejection, you have to put the two types of people who handles threats. 1) Many just laugh and delete the message and/or block the user. And honestly, you should fall in this category. 2) Others are scared and wonder what the user on the other end is capable of. So why bother with a reply that can explode in your face if you can just instead... not reply at all? In fact, to this day this is the reason why the blocking system on my site is a silent one instead of a flashing one that tells the other party that you blocked his profile. Because I've been through this myself. In my case, I can laugh, but I think of the other users who instead become shrouded with fear. Anyway, this is still a subject for debate. I'll continue on this topic another time.
Blog ID 161