Why I Won’t Date a Guy Who LOL’s

For lots of people, we all have our own set of preferences that we are looking for in a partner. Some would call it a “type” while others don’t care about the specifics about the person they date, as long as they are a good person and there is chemistry. Simple enough, right?

We are about to share a story with you about a woman who has one peculiar rule that she’s completely adamant about — she can’t date a man with bad grammar (we can get behind that), but she also would “never, ever date someone who says ‘lol.’” Even if that meant she had to date a “man with a bad lisp, two lazy eyes or one who wore proper shoes with jeans.”

Before you start shaking your first, the woman is fully aware that it probably comes off as snobby, petty, and a tad bit arrogant, however, she is a firm believer that textspeak is taking over our language and it is reducing the us to a bunch of “emotionally incontinent mawks,” as Janice Turner from the Times would say.

LOL (laughing out loud for those who aren’t aware) can actually be found in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011 as an “initialism,” which means it’s an abbreviation that consists of the initial letters of a name or an expression. Similar phrases include: tmi (too much information), imho (in my humble opinion), and the most over used one of them all, yolo (you only live once). These acronyms are expected, thanks to the way we communicate via social media and the like. Be that as it may, she and many others like her, refuse to acknowledge these acronyms as a replacement for words or even worse, legitimate human emotions.

This laziness is irritating, but it also shows no thought goes into the conversation. The woman (and a lot of other educated individuals around the world) also gets irate when people abuse the use of an emoji, create nonsensical hashtags, or update a status with something stupid that has no real pertinence to anything that’s going on.

She shares a conversation (if you want to call it that) that she witnessed on Twitter recently.

Girl: OMG. Boys are SO frustrating # Girl Problems *angry emoticon*

Boy: why are we frustrating lol *winky emoticon*

This sort of conversation is depressing and baffling on so many levels. There’s no punctuation, there’s text speak, and emojis. While it’s understandable that you’ve only got 140 characters to convey a complete and coherent thought, there’s got to be more to it than that. There has to be something more to this exchange than a hashtag, a couple of emojis, and abbreviations, right? So where is it??

If you’re using “lol” as a means of expression, you are taking liberties. After all, prior to technology, how did you convey that something was amusing or that you are upset? You didn’t go around grumbling and making faces without having some sort of communication that clearly indicates what is going through your mind. In fact, you probably voiced your concerns in clear and thought out sentences. You’ve took concepts like humor that’s splattered with irony, sarcasm, satire, parody, slapstick pathos and bathos to help you let someone know you’re amused. So as complex as this how, how did it get reduced down to three or four letters?

Another issue is the ambiguity that is used to hide emotions. For example, you could insult someone, but assume that it is made right simply by saying “just teasing, lol.” At the end. People are under the impression that lol is always going to be there to lessen the blow of bad news, when in truth it is a weak attempt at best.

Have you ever been a part of a conversation where someone legitimately says something in textspeak? For example instead of saying “Oh my god,” they will say “O. M. G.” The younger generation believes that this is normal and an acceptable form of communication, but trust us when we say it is not and you sound stupid.

So, in short, whenever you think you’re being clever or ironic by saying “lol” or some other bastardized abbreviation for a word or phrase, please rethink hitting the send button. Save yourself the embarrassment.