Text Flirting — What to Do When She Doesn’t

I’m usually a fan of advice based on positivity, but sometimes you need to deal with not so great situations.  I just ran into one of these last night, and I’m going to use it as a springboard for this question:  what do you do when your text flirting falls flat?

Here’s what triggered this…a couple weeks ago I went out with some friends, and met this girl Ashleigh (yes, she had the unusual spelling and made sure I got it right).  Over three bars and many drinks we hit it off, and ended up at my place that night and had fun.  You’d think it’d go somewhere…but it ended up awry.

She forgot some jewelry at my house, so I waited until the following evening and sent a quick teasing text “just found a silver bracelet…so not my style, wonder who’s it could be ;) ”.  For any girl into me, that’d work wonders.  Instead…I got a one-word text of “Whoops”.

For anyone paying attention to the rules of tempo knows that her answering my text with one word is a bad sign.  Still, we did just hook up the night before so perhaps she was playing coy.  I left it on ice for a few days and tried again.

Long story short, I used a few casual pinging texts over the course of the next week and a half.  Each time, I’d get a weak response from her.  Sometimes you need to just grin and bear that time period and keep trying, as she’ll come around.  This time, she didn’t.

So, when you’ve had a good exchange with a girl but then your flirty text is suddenly falling on deaf ears, there are a couple things to keep in mind:
1.  Don’t keep digging your hole.  It’s tempting to keep sending her more texts to try to turn it around, but any time she’s giving you weak responses, go quiet and wait to try again another day.  If you instead keep pushing, you’ll permanently hurt her attraction to you.

2.  You can be persistent…but it must be patient.  It’s one thing to text a girl once or twice a week until either she starts responding positively or you lose interest.  What isn’t cool is trying over and over again, day after day.  A good rule of thumb is this:  wait one day after the first text, then for every text that doesn’t go somewhere, wait an extra day.  So, skip one day…then skip two…then skip three…etc.  This keeps you from going into “OMG stalker territory” in her eyes while giving you a shot at turning it around.

Now, in the story I told you here I followed my own text flirting advice and it didn’t pan out.  That happens.  Just to show you another example, a couple months ago I met this girl at a downtown bar.  The first text I sent her got a lukewarm response, so I waited a day and tried again.  Still a weak response.  I waited two days, and got another so-so reply.  I then waited three days after that…and when I sent her a casual joke, I got a great reply and ended up seeing her later that week.

It turns out she had a boyfriend so we didn’t go anywhere, but by being patiently persistent, I met her and her friends out and ended up dating one of them for a while.  The right kind of low-key pursuit in flirting can work for you, you just have to accept that there’s always going to be randomness in who goes somewhere and who doesn’t.

Interested in how to send flirty texts and be successful with seeing her again? Check out this book, which takes you through everything you need to know about what to text her, when to text, and how to handle her both when she’s already into you and when you have to do some work to get her interested.

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Texting Girls — Does it Matter When you Text?

One good question for anyone texting girls is this…when should you text?  Does it matter if it’s 10 AM vs 10 PM?  And does it vary by person?  I say yes to all of these…let’s look at some details.

First off, the times to text depend on the day of the week.  In general, I group it like so:
1.  Monday through Friday afternoon — Work/School time, where you can assume girls are usually at class or earning a living for most of the daytime, and that they probably don’t want to be having 2 AM text exchanges with new guys.

2.  Friday evening through Saturday night — Fun time, as girls with social lives–which include most any attractive girl that you’d want to text–are going to be hitting parties, going clubbing, and generally hanging out with their nearest and dearest.  Which, for our purposes, is not yet you.

3.  Sunday — The transition day, where the rules work a little differently…more to come on that subject.

For work-week texting, you have several options.  I’ve found that texting during the actual working day–say between 10 AM and 4 PM–can be effective with 9 to 5 office workers.  I would not text earlier than 10 nor later than 4, as you run into people who work different shifts and/or will be more worried about either getting settled into work or commuting home rather than talking to you.  For students, this range also holds true as not all of them have morning classes, and texting before 10 can lead to conflicts.

I would generally avoid texting around the end of the workday and through dinner time, which goes from roughly 4 PM to 8 PM for most girls.  They usually are either busy going somewhere, having dinner with or without friends, or generally caught up in something.

That leaves the sweet spot of 8 PM to roughly 11 PM.  For most girls, they’re going to be in the wind-down part of their night by 8, and you can text them with a good chance of response up through 10 to perhaps 11.  I would text no later, unless you’re dealing with a girl who works nights (such as a bartender).

Weekend texting brings a different set of hazards.  As much as no one enjoys games, it’s in your best interests to seem like a guy with a lively nightlife, which means that even if you’re sitting at home watching Lost reruns at 10 PM on a Friday…you don’t want her to know that.

For that reason, I consider texting later than 7 to 8 PM on both Friday and Saturday a bad move, unless you’re using a mass invite or the like to try to meet up with her that night.  That’s a more advanced tactic, so for now, I say stay away from that time slot.  Meanwhile, you can text on the afternoons as normal, which can be useful for setting up that same-night rendevous.

The one other exception is that when you meet a girl that night, you can safely text her at the end (say around 2 AM).  See this article on sending the flirty text for a description of the same-night text.

Lastly, we have Sunday, the day of transitioning from weekend fun to workweek drudgery.  Time-wise, treat this like a work-week:  it’s effective to text either afternoon or late evening, but no later than 11.

Sundays have a very nice perk to them, however:  as they happen at the end of the weekend, where most single girls are still single and probably had a night or two out without meeting cool guys, they tend to be more open to talking to new men in their lives.  For that reason, I will almost always text girls Sunday evenings between 8 to 10 PM, maybe a touch later.  It’s your single best time slot during the week.

Keep these date and time arrangements in mind, and you’ll give your text girls game a boost.  Contacting her at the wrong time–either 7 AM Tuesday morning or midnight on a Friday–will potentially hurt your burgeoning relationship, so pay attention to the time boundaries and enjoy the rewards.

Interested in how to send flirty texts and be successful with seeing her again? Check out this book, which takes you through everything you need to know about what to text her, when to text, and how to handle her both when she’s already into you and when you have to do some work to get her interested.

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Text Flirting — A Matter of Timing

Maintaining the tempo of texting is important…but before you can get into managing your text message flow, you need to time when to contact her.  Let’s go over that…here’s the scenario:  you’ve just met a cute girl at the bar Friday night, and you want to follow up.  Do you call or text?

You’re reading this site so I’m sure you know I’m going to say “text!”, but there’s a good reason for it.  Calling a girl for your first contact is like going all in on a poker hand:  all your chips are on the table and if she doesn’t return your call, you’re probably done.  On the flip side, texting is like probing for interest…with the right first text, even if she doesn’t answer you can try again later.

Also, most 20-something women (and an increasing number of older ones) are compulsive texters, and are simply more comfortable with it than that nerve-wracking first call.  After all, as scary as it can be for a guy to call her and have to make it into an exciting talk…every attractive girl has had awful drawn-out phone talks to nowhere, and so is cautious about getting into them again.  Like it or not, all men pay the price for those who can’t handle themselves with girls.

Now that we’ve agreed on texting her, the next question is…when?  I love Swingers (the movie, for the culturally clueless ;) as much as the next guy, but the era of waiting “exactly two days” is done.  For girls that you meet in nightlife–ie. bars or clubs–I’ve found your best bet for the first text message is within 24 hours.  

If you meet her at 11 PM on a Friday, you can even send the first one as you go home at last call.  If you’ve met the girl during the day or through friends, you can safely bump that window of time up to 48 hours…but again, I would not drag it out.

I can already hear cries of “but isn’t that needy!”, so let me put this way:  playing super aloof may sound like good advice to guys who used to come on too strong to girls, but it’s a trap of its own making.  When you’ve met a girl with alcohol on the table–which is true for most nightlife and house parties–even if she was into you at the time, there’s a risk of her forgetting you quickly…especially if she’s given her number out to four other guys that night.

Instead, you’re better off sending that first text early…and starting your text flirting on the right foot.  From there, you can get more creative with your timing and content of messages.  At the same time, never forget this:  you text her to get her to meet you out, as real gains are only happening in person.  The flirty text is just another tool on the path to having women in your life, though it’s now a critical one.

Interested in how to send flirty texts and be successful with seeing her again? Check out this book, which takes you through everything you need to know about what to text her, when to text, and how to handle her both when she’s already into you and when you have to do some work to get her interested.

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Flirty Text Messages — Keeping Tempo

With the rise of flirty texting, the challenge of finding the right notes to hit when texting girls has become crucial to successful dating.  There are a handful of ways to manage your texting, including one of the most important:  tempo.

Tempo is the rhythm of your interaction with a girl.  The kind of tempo you have comes down to who texts who, how long you wait between messages, and how long those messages are.  Let’s look at an example of bad tempo, then I’ll get into the details of it.

Bad Tempo:
guy:  hey cowgirl, what’s up?
girl:  haha hey you, not much. studying, got an early exam
guy:  oh yeah that’s rough, i’m always studying last minute and rushing to get to class. especially in biology! ;)
girl:  yeah me too
guy:  so, what’re you studying?
girl:  english 201, chaucer
guy:  oh yeah I hated that guy.  way too slow reading
girl:  yeah, gotta go, getting late
guy:  oh ok, goodnight, good luck tomorrow!
girl:  (no response)

Painful to read, isn’t it?  I’ll be the first to admit that I had a conversation or two just like that back in the day, and I have a feeling that if you’re here…you can relate ;)  Let’s take a look at what’s wrong with this picture:

1.  Length of texts
At the start of the text, the girl was pacing the guy and sending texts about equally long.  Note that some of his texts were literally almost twice the length of hers.

This might sound minor, but think about it:  looking over this exchange, who wants who more?  Who’s chasing?  As much as it’s frustrating to have to play games like this, with text flirting you need to be careful not to overplay your hand early on.  

When her responses started getting short, he needed to do the same thing…or just go quiet, which leads us to the next point:

2.  The back-and-forth flow
Here the guy texted first…which is usually going to happen, at least until you’ve slept with or at least gone out with the girl in question.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but, when you text first…it becomes important to have her text last.  

In this case, he could have gone silent on almost any of her texts.  The fact that he kept trying to keep the flow going cost him, as his every text got weaker until the end when he wished her well and got no response.  He started fine, but should have stopped after she sent him the negative response of “yeah me too”, which shows she’s not into the conversation.  Anytime you sense the end coming, don’t try to prolong the texting, but instead end it gracefully by going quiet.  It gives you room to recover from mistakes.

3.  Overly emotional
I’ve said it before, but need to keep hammering this one home:  you can’t show more emotion than she does.  Here he got a good reply on his callback humor, but after that, he was the one using ! and ;) while she was sending him flat replies.

There’s a primer on keeping tempo in your flirty text messages…this can literally be the difference between a girl meeting you out or forgetting you completely, so you need to stay on top of it.  Your goal should be to roughly pace her emotional investment and length of messages, while looking to end texting exchanges on a high note–and on your terms.

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The Flirty Text

Last time we took a hard look at ways to not send flirty texts…and now we’re going to get started with the right way to send a flirty text to a new girl that you just met, say at a bar or party.  Now, I’ll talk about timing when to send this text later…but for now, just understand that you should text relatively fast, within 24 hours for cold approach (ie meeting a new girl at a club) and up to 48 hours for someone you met through friends.

The point of this first text message isn’t to get into a long conversation–we’re going to send her something to cement her memory of us, and also gauge how interested she is right off the bat.  

Alright, so it’s time to send the first text.  What to say?  There are two reliable ways to go…
1.  Callback humor:  any time you have a good flirty interaction with a girl–and if you’re not doing that, then fix that problem before you even worry about texting–you should have a good inside joke or two come up.  For example, if you find out a girl grew up in Texas and used to ride horses…you can nickname her “cowgirl”.  When you send a first text to her, you can use something like “hey cowgirl, better get to bed early…you need to feed bessie in the morning ;) ”

The trick to good callback humor is to find something that playfully recalls your conversation.  Don’t abuse it however, you should at most use it every other time or so when texting her.  Too many repetitions will play the joke out.

2. The generic non-needy goodbye:  this is a whole order of magnitude weaker than callback humor, but can be used if you have nothing funny lined up but need to make that first text.  I’ve had good success with this tried and true:  ”Nice meeting you, have a good night.  ~(my name)”  

It’s bland as all hell, but has an effective test built right in:  if she won’t bite on this, then you didn’t get enough initial interest on the first meeting to come out for a date anyway.  When she responds, don’t expect much…but the more emotion she puts in her response–such as extra emoticons or punctuation–the better a first impression you put on her.  This will tell you where you stand with her, and you’ll then follow up with something better later on.

There are some of the basics for sending a flirty text to a new girl.  The best approach is to use a little wit and nail some callback humor to her, as when you can reference the conversation in a funny way, it’s going to put her back in social mode and remembering meeting you.  If you can’t do something flirty based on that, your next best approach is the generic–but not overly emotional–polite greeting.  While that won’t build attraction, it will not cost if she’s already interested in you…and will also give you a good idea how likely she is to meet up when you text in the future.

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