Thoughts

So let’s assume you’ve gone through all the various profiles and made your choices, and by some miracle you’ve actually matched with someone. What do you do now? Well the answer is pretty obvious, first you have to talk!

I think we all go through some version of these questions, irrespective of our circumstances on all of the apps. For each question however, the answer pretty much comes down to “It depends.”

What does it depend on exactly? Well it depends on you, and it also depends on the person you have matched with. Plenty of different sites out there discuss strategies for conversing, and I’ve even seen articles titled “How to talk to women”. That doesn’t even go down the darker paths of some of the other content out there that seems to be advocating for using manipulation to try and get engagement (eg ’negging’, ‘breadcrumbing’, ’love bombing’, etc).

For me at least it isn’t all that different to talking to anyone else in life, the best option is to just be yourself and to try and be engaging by asking and answering questions and not leaving huge time gaps between messages. Using closed conversation tactics such as single word answers, taking hours (or days) to respond or not diversifying the subjects of the conversation are a surefire way of killing any engagement that might have started up from the first message.

Maintaining the conversation can be a challenge, particularly if only one person is putting in the effort to do so. So if you’re wondering where a conversation went wrong, it honestly could be you, or could be them. Fundamentally it isn’t something to worry too much about, you can’t force a conversation to happen and even if you can it almost certainly won’t end up being positive. I’ve adopted the policy of sending one or two “open” messages (ones which leave room to be responded to in some form) and if I get no reply, to just leave it alone and move on.

If you’re stuck wondering what to talk about, maybe just say so! That and the challenges faced by talking to someone you don’t know for the first time is actually something to talk about in its own right, and it opens the door to suggest other means of communicating or even a face to face meeting.

Ultimately, matching with someone on an app is just an opening to another human interaction. It can feel awkward and strange, but if you don’t talk or start the conversation then you can guarantee it will go nowhere. There is no “correct” order for one person to message another either, especially in this modern age, so I tend to take the approach of whoever matches second and confirms the mutual match really should be the one to message first. That said, if you don’t have any intention of taking it anywhere, either don’t match in the first place or just unmatch, it will save everyone involved a bunch of trouble wondering what is going on.

How it often goes wrong

So often conversations just seem to sort of go nowhere. We’ve all heard the like.. “Hey, how was your day?”, or the simpler “WYD?” (What are you doing?).

So why is this such a common opening line, and why does it annoy so many people?

I’m of the opinion that it is a common opener for a few reasons. One is because a lot of people don’t know how to open a conversation any other way effectively. This isn’t really all that surprising, especially when profiles might have nothing on the bio or the photos might not give much clue on what could be talked about.

Another main reason is it is a very safe question to ask. It opens the discussion with no preconceptions, and no expectations. It shows interest in the other person in a non-specific way which avoids the creepy factor that can come from asking more specific questions and allows the person responding to open up as much or as little as they choose.

Thirdly, it is a way to learn about each other and gain insight to new potential topics to talk about. You might have heard the saying “you need to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk”, and the same applies to conversation. Small talk type questions such as this are the gateway to deeper conversations once you have learned more about each other.

So why do people dislike this particular opening line so much? Pretty much because it is seen to be low effort. This is particularly the case for people who get a large number of matches, as they might get that question from dozens of matches and it gets tiring to essentially have the same conversation over and over again. It also in part puts pressure on the person being asked in that they feel they need to have an “interesting” life to keep others interested in them.

As a conversation starter, it also gets rather repetitive and boring. I’ve found that happens in particular where it is hard to get the conversation running (such as when the other person only responds once every eight or more hours), so the first stage of small talk ends up happening over and over again to try and get things started.

Can it be salvaged or avoided?

Really, who knows? You can’t force someone to communicate, and without anything to actually work with to start a conversation the options are rather limited. Avoiding such pitfalls really depend on you and on the other person as well, but when trying to open a conversation, try and vary it a bit. Ask about the photos on their profile, use the prompts that some apps provide where possible, ask a different question or even tell a (safe) joke. If you’re on the receiving end of a question (even a boring one), don’t give a closed answer which leaves no room to expand or continue the conversation either. A good option is to either segue the conversation or ask another question in response to keep things moving.

If you’ve already found yourself in the situation where the conversation is dying or dead, it might be salvageable… But you’d need to do something quite different to recapture the attention you’ve lost. I haven’t had much success when this happens either (although I try and avoid the more boring topics to begin with), so I’ve adopted a policy of leaving a message or two and then just letting the conversation sit as it is. It saves time and energy rather than worrying about a conversation which just isn’t happening.