There’s no bigger turn off than a text full of typos

AN ATTRACTIVE man who likes rock music is chatting me up in a bar when his friends tug on his sleeve to say they’re going to be late for a party. Offering a rueful smile, he takes my number and the next day I get a text. First, he admits he’s forgotten my name. Not the most romantic opener . . . still, I bat away his apology as he seems keen. But his next move really does scrunch my face in confusion.

‘Ma bad,’ he replies. Is his mother ill?

Of course, I know he’s just using text slang for ‘my fault’. But I sigh. Because textspeak only normally means a man is either lazy or illiterate — and there are few quicker ways to lose my interest.

I’m not alone. A recent study found almost 70 per cent of single people are ‘turned off’ by poorly written messages, especially textspeak, abbreviations and poor grammar or spelling.

In my case, it’s worse because I can’t help contrasting the bombardment of typos with my parents’ enduringly sweet love story.

They met in the late 1980s after my dad placed a carefully crafted advert on the dating page of Time Out magazine.

Then, he employed the same filter to his responses that I do more than 30 years later. Of the two dozen handwritten replies he received, he first threw out the ‘very badly spelled ones, or those that looked like they’d been written by a six-year-old’.

The fourth (and last) person he met of the only six letters remaining was my mother. I didn’t know any of this until I was 26 because they were too embarrassed to admit it, in the same way couples who met on Tinder in the early days were. Instead, they told me they’d met in a pub.

But from a 2022 perspective, the story is even more romantic. To this day, my dad claims he can’t remember what he wrote in his ad, but my mum keeps it in her jewellery box and tells me it started: ‘There is life out of London — would you like to live it with me?’

he was planning to move from the capital to Cornwall and wanted to meet someone who might join him. his interests were listed as: ‘Schubert, T.S. eliot and children (none yet)’, and when I thought about him throwing away all the misspelled letters, I realised that was an interest of his, too: someone who cared about language as much as he did.

It’s a rule I live by after rather bitter experience. I understand that mass digital communication

Language is important in the hunt for true love

calls for quick, pithy responses, but I don’t want to sit staring at my phone, trying to work out what someone is trying to say.

One text I got, from a royal Marine I dated for a very short time, said: ‘ hdy juts going to shower up brb’.

Texting him was exhausting: everything had to be decoded and translated. It was also extremely unattractive to imagine I was seeing someone quite so dim (despite him having gone to eton).

According to Google, that sentence could have meant ‘how dare you’ (hdy), ‘just’ ( juts, an entry- level spelling mistake if ever I saw one) and ‘be right back’ (brb).

I don’t need conquests to have an english degree, as I do, but there would be no point dating a man with so little interest in words he can’t even type some of them.

Language is so important in the hunt for love. The way you speak and write says so much about how curious and interested in the world you are. Writing a half-decent message with humour or spark, instead of firing off meaningless rubbish, is also a way to show you care.

I recently went on a date with a man who showed an almost overthe-top love of words. I joked he sounded like a dictionary and he admitted people at school used to ask if he’d read the whole thing. he had, he stage-whispered.

Frankly, it was the best date I’ve been on in ages.