Overall, men like winks. They might not like a wink as much as they like an actual message from a woman, but a wink is better than receiving nothing from a woman. As a man, navigating an online dating website isn’t that much less confusing or less fraught with peril than finding your way through a real world singles environment (like a bar). Even after reading a woman’s online dating profile, there’s no real way to know if she is going to be interested. Men can read a woman’s profile, feel like they connected in an endless number of meaningful ways, send her an incredible message detailing these connections (without coming on too strong) and still fail to receive a response from her. Because there’s no way to know whether a woman will find a man attractive or not, every single message he sends out is a gamble.   “By sending a wink, you entice a man to make the first bold move.” And women on dating websites make this matter even worse because, as a general rule, women don’t send out a lot of first messages on these platforms. Most women are too busy responding to the flood of messages they’ve received to spend too much time browsing for new men to talk to, and women have at least as many problems as men when it comes to marshaling together the nerve to actually send out a full message to someone they find attractive.