You could call it “emotional eggplanting”. The biggest mistake women make, in her experience, is overexposing themselves in a different way. “Honestly, some of my male clients get some weird stuff too,” Leadingham tells me. Those are not good.”īut is it only the men making people feel uncomfortable? According to both coaches, the answer seems to be yes a lot of the time – but not always. “And then there’s another one where the emoji has pink cheeks and big eyes like they’re embarrassed for you (😳). “Any of the evil monkeys, yeah,” she says. Leadingham says she has seen all the different monkey emojis appear frequently in the messages her female clients have received. “To be like, I’m sorry, I messed up, but I’m still cute, though, right?” “It’s like a facepalm but it’s meant to soften the blow a little bit,” says Alley. More often than not this causes a very awkward situation – and this is where the monkey emoji comes in. The easiest dating secret in the world is make the person feel like they’re the most important person in the room, you know?” It can really be a big turnoff for women. “They assume the person is ready to meet them already, and ready to like them. “Men get too direct too quickly,” she says. And they’ll try to make it more palatable with the sweating-while-smiling emoji (😅), which shows that they’re being inappropriate, but also aware of the fact they’re being inappropriate.Īmie Leadingham, a dating coach based in Los Angeles, says she sees this too. “But they do.” He says men will also use the purple devil emoji (😈) in a sexual way with women they barely know. “The eggplant (🍆) emoji is the stupidest thing any man could ever send to a woman,” says Alley. A big part of his job is going through their chat logs and figuring out where his clients have gone wrong.Īccording to Alley, the biggest mistake straight men make with emojis is the same as their biggest mistake overall: being far too direct or inappropriate. He works with men and women on their dating profiles and messaging. “Men are apologizing a lot,” says Max Alley, an online dating coach based in New York. ‘The eggplant emoji is the stupidest thing any man could ever send to a woman.’ Illustration: Max Benwell But in some cases, the answer seems to be … yes, it does. Why does the monkey emoji resonate so strongly? And does it really open up a giant door into male psychology? Of course, we shouldn’t generalize. ( One Twitter user jokingly asked: “Should men who use the monkey emoji have rights? Be honest.” It received 18,000 retweets.) For example, when was the last time you saw a woman use the monkey (🙉) emoji ? A favourite among men who’ve just embarrassed themselves, it may be one of the most divisive out there.

Research has shown that there are broad but clear differences in emoji usage between genders.

According to the latest reports, the cry laughing emoji (😂) is passé among zoomers, who prefer to use the skull and crossbones symbol (☠️) to convey that they are literally (but not literally-literally) dead.īut while this generational war is mostly overblown, there are some marked differences in how men and women use emojis, as evidenced by recent studies analyzing millions of messages between them. A lot has been written on the so-called war between millennials and Gen Z and how they use emojis.

Mokey emoji