Semicolon Cleansing

How important is it that personal style and sensibilities match in a relationship? I'm 24 and having trouble agreeing to a first date with a man if he texts or emails me an emoticon. I majored in literature, love language, and see the emoticon as the epitome of intellectual laziness and bad expression of self. -- :( "O Romeo, Romeo...eeuw, Romeo...you're wearing dad jeans and a T-shirt with a wolf on it, and not in an ironic way." As a younger woman, you're more likely to dump guys over little things, like style crimes. But after a few years of dating, and a few rounds with some Slick Ricks, minor sensibility mismatches should pale in comparison with serial cheating and undeclared STDs. (You can steer a guy into cooler shirts. It's harder to get a guy to throw on some ethics.) That said, as a lit hound, you aren't "shallow" in looking critically at a guy's emoticon use, just unwise in cutting him off before the first date because of it -- assuming the rest of his email doesn't reveal scorching illiteracy and poor self-expression. Maybe this is his one area of intellectual laziness. We all have some -- for example, the intellectually lazy assumption that somebody's intellectually lazy just because he sometimes "winks" with punctuation marks.