A lack of spelling can ruin an appointment. Especially if you’re a man and you’re looking for a female partner. The emergence of social networks and digital dating services has created new filters at the time of contact. And one of them is the way to express oneself in messages, especially with regard to spelling. This is confirmed by studies conducted by various online dating portals. According to a Zoosk portal survey, two out of three women would not have sex with a person who commits misspellings. In the case of men, the percentage is slightly lower, but six out of ten say that they would also cancel an appointment for this reason. And the Spanish portal AdoptaUnTio analyzed last year a hundred profiles of customers with spelling mistakes and another hundred who did not have and found that 59% of those who do not commit faults are more likely to get a couple, compared to 31% among those who commit some kind of fault.

And it is not only for those who speak in Spanish. A study of the Match portal in 2016 on 5500 Americans showed that 88% of women and 75% of men considered that making good use of grammar was an important quality to be taken into account when citing someone. What leads someone to reject a relationship because of a misuse of language? “A lack of spelling is a stimulus that shows things,” and many people make the correlation that “the more spelling mistakes someone makes, the more uneducated that person is,” says Mireia Cabero, a psychologist and professor of Psychology and Education. And he stresses that this has to do with the persistence of “many prejudices”.

Cabero recalls that the intelligence of a person can not be explained only by having an unblemished spelling, because we have multiple intelligences. And it points out that, beyond linguistic intelligence -which would be linked to good verbal expression and good spelling- there are others, such as the spatial-logical, the emotional, the naturalistic or the artistic, in which the strong point is probably not it will be the written or verbal expression.

Cabero explains that when it comes to looking for the ideal partner in a man, many women look for profiles of men that provide security, and this is the result of tradition and historical pressure. “Historically, women have the burden of having been that part of the family with less economic possibilities, and we have believed that we need to have men who provide security in all areas,” and many women see culture as one of those values ​​that provide security, the teacher argues.

The influence of social networks

There are spelling mistakes that are committed intentionally. The director of the Catalan Language and Literature program Ona ​​Domenech says that new technologies have created a new register of language in which informality and colloquiality predominate. In social networks it is usual to write fast, save letters. Linguists call it texting. There is no direct correlation between the use of social networks and worse spelling, according to different researches with children and adolescents. In young people, abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons, typographical errors and spelling mistakes are usually phonetic.