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.