From therapists and life coaches to online courses about how to make someone obsessed with you, there is a whole cottage industry centred around romantic texting. But if someone’s not interested, can you really trick them into changing their mind?
I have a simple, tried-and-tested set of rules for texting someone you’ve just started dating. First, take the number of hours it takes them to reply to you and multiply it by the square root of the total number of days you’ve been speaking with each other – that’s how long you should leave it before getting back to them. You don’t want to come across as desperate, babe.
Next, punctuation. The goal is to project an air of complete indifference bordering on hostility – keep them guessing as to whether you’re romantically interested or plotting to kill them in a tragic “accident” at an axe-throwing bar. Don’t even think about sending a question mark until you’ve got them to sign a legally binding contract that outlines their intentions, which I’d recommend doing before the first date. End all messages – even questions – with a full stop: the enigmatic allure of “did you have a nice weekend.” or “do you like films.” will drive them into a frenzy of erotic obsession.
Finally, emojis. If someone has just been vulnerable for the first time – perhaps by opening about a painful moment from their past, like the death of a beloved relative, or expressing their feelings towards you – hit them back with a cool thumbs-up. Other than that, avoid them, along with anything else which might suggest an air of playfulness: what are you, a 12-year-old child? This is serious business! I can’t promise you that following these steps will help you form meaningful connections, but I can promise that you will emerge as the victor of every romantic exchange, which is far more important.
This is the kind of content that Instagram has been forcing me to consume over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, it is impossible to complain about social media algorithms without revealing the darkest depths of your own psyche. They don’t always get it right (despite what Instagram seems to think, my hairline is in excellent shape, thank you very much!) but sometimes they can peer into your soul and discern exactly what you are most neurotic about at a given moment: your body, your skin, your teeth, the state of your career or intimate relations. So I realise it’s no coincidence that Instagram has recently been serving me reels about texting, and I admit that I may have Googled an innocent question or two on the subject… but the frequency is still a bit much. It’s left me struggling to discern whether my algorithm is uniquely deranged or whether texting is the single greatest source of anxiety in modern dating. Probably a bit of both.
From life coaches and online therapists to poetry collections to apps which offer courses on how to “make him obsessed”, there is now an entire cottage industry profiting from the misery of digital courtship. It’s not surprising that the demand is there. Most of us still meet our partners through apps, which means that texting is the primary point at which potential relationships fail, and the medium through which we most frequently experience rejection, whether that’s the gradual withering away of a once-promising connection or a gratingly nice message like “you are the most wonderful person I’ve ever met and spending one evening with you was the honour of my life… but I’m just not feeling the spark.”
On TikTok or Instagram, you’ll find a lot of reasonable advice about dealing with these problems (‘try not to let the talking stage last too long before meeting in person’, for example), but there is a more ruthless and manipulative kind, which encourages cold calculation over spontaneity and seems to believe the goal of flirting is to chisel away at someone else’s will. Some of this content is aimed specifically at women, others at men, but there emerge a few core tenets: you should always match someone else’s reply time, length of reply and level of enthusiasm, and the worst thing you can do is to come across as enthusiastic.
The advice on offer sometimes borders on delusional. For the sake of your own wellbeing, it’s a good idea to stop engaging with someone who doesn’t seem interested, to cut your losses sooner rather than later and keep it moving. Once you do this, the likely outcome is that you’ll never hear from them again: it’s a sad fact of life that we are rarely given the chance to sing “Cry Me A River” (by Ella Fitzgerald not Justin Timberlake) at a fickle ex-lover who has realised their mistake and come crawling back. They probably don’t care, just as we have all at one point aired someone and then never again given them a moment’s thought. But for some of these online life coaches, a discernible lack of interest is not something to be accepted but a challenge to be overcome or a slight to be avenged.
Take Justin Gillespie (@adhdtherapist_jay) for example, who recounts the advice he gave to a friend who was aired by a man for 16 hours: “you’re gonna wait three more days to see if he follows up, and if he doesn’t: cancelled. If he does [...] you’re gonna leave him on read then on the third day you’re gonna be like, ‘yeah I’m someone who doesn’t leave people on read so I wanted you to know what this feels like.” This might be good advice for proving a point and teaching some random person a lesson, but it doesn’t seem like good advice for achieving a satisfying love life or being a remotely stable person.
Malcolm “MJ” Harris – an entrepreneur and bestselling author with over a million followers on Instagram – similarly advises responding to indifference with even greater indifference: if a man texts “hey”, you should wait a day before replying with “what’s up”; if he texts “lol” after you share something, wait a day before replying “?”. Why would you even bother to keep this conversation going? Why not just free yourself from the cycle of mutual negging and find someone who actually likes you?
While I hate to admit it, I can recognise some kernel of truth in this genre of brash, cynical advice: there is something to be said for maintaining a little mystique, for actually having other things going on, rather than just pretending to, and not bombarding a new squeeze with mundane updates about your day. But I don’t think the answer to the cold disposability of modern dating is more cynicism and more scheming, or that anyone is going to find the partner of their dreams by manipulating them with mind tricks from a TikTok therapist.