i have started copy pasting my openers and i feel grubby about it

confession, and i suspect i am not alone.

about two months ago i wrote a first message i was really pleased with. specific enough to sound thoughtful, open ended, easy to answer, a bit funny. i sent it to someone and she replied within the hour.

so i sent it to someone else. and then someone else. with a line changed each time to reference something from their profile, but the bones of it are identical and by now i can type it without thinking.

reply rate is up. noticeably. and i feel absolutely grubby about it, because the entire argument on this board is that people can tell when a message is not really addressed to them, and here i am proving it works.

so which is it. is a reusable opener just being efficient with a limited amount of evening, or is it the thing everyone complains about receiving? and can you actually tell, from your side, when a message has been sent before.

I can tell, and I want you to know that I can tell. Not from the words, which are probably fine. From the fit. A pasted opener is always very slightly the wrong shape for the profile it landed on, in the way a jacket that belongs to somebody your size still does not belong to you. Keep the structure by all means. The content has to be about the person.

everyone has a template. the ones claiming otherwise have an unconscious one. the crime is not the template it is not putting anything of theirs in it

That is roughly where I have landed too. Mine is a shape rather than a text: one thing from their page, one thing from mine that connects to it, one easy question. The shape is identical every time and no two messages share a sentence. That takes about ninety seconds rather than ten, and ninety seconds is not a burden.

worth noticing why you started, though. you said the reply rate was low. pasting is what people do when the effort stopped feeling connected to the outcome, and that is a rational response to a stretch of silence rather than a moral failing

and it is self fulfilling, which is the bit that gets you. paste, get a worse reply rate, feel more justified in pasting, and eighteen months later you are sending forty identical messages a month and telling everyone the site is dead