I Got Her Number, Now What?: A Geek's Guide to Texting, Snapchatting and Sliding into DMs by O'Malley Harris

Author:O'Malley, Harris [O'Malley, Harris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: NerdLove Publications
Published: 2018-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Don’t Over Text (Or: Respect The Ratio)

Texting is, by it’s nature, intended to be short. It’s a bite-size conversation, one that was initially limited by bandwidth, screen-size and the annoyance of trying to write words with a numeric keypad. The advent of messaging apps and smartphones with full QWERTY keyboards has made texting easier than ever before, but that doesn’t mean that every texting conversation is meant to be an hours-long marathon.

Just as in-person conversations can drag on too long, so too can texting conversations. Even best friends can eventually get tired of constantly hearing the ding of an incoming text or the flashing Facebook Messenger notification.

It’s very easy to overstay your welcome in a conversation with someone, and this is a great way to ensure that you’ll never actually see them in person.

If you want to date, then your goal of getting someone’s number is not have long discussions about the nature of life, the universe and everything. While these can be great, don’t get me wrong, having long drawn-out conversations is more likely to leave you with a texting buddy, not a date.

One of the ways that you can avoid over-texting is to be aware of The Ratio. When you’re messaging back and forth, the amount that you are texting should be roughly equal to the amount the other person is texting you. You want to keep things to a roughly 1-to-1 ratio.

This, for example, makes for a good ratio:

Hey, how do you feel about beer and skee-ball?

I love skee-ball. I used to make my parents take me to Dave And Busters all the time when I was younger.

I know what you mean. It was my dream to win enough tickets to get something insane like an Xbox or something.

Don’t get jealous, but I was the skee-ball champion. I’ve walked away with literally thousands of tickets before.

Clearly we need to have a contest to see which of us is the master.

Oh it is so on.

Both parties are responding with roughly equal enthusiasm, as reflected by the back-and-forth and similar length of replies. Everybody is interested and engaged in the conversation.

This, on the other hand, is a bad ratio:

The Westworld event sold out pretty much as soon as it was announced, so I didn’t get tickets. But two of my friends abused their media connections and got to go. Apparently it was freaking amazing.

Yup.

So I’m not jealous. At all. Really. Not at all.

Nope.

This is a very one-sided conversation. One person is invested and excited. The other is only paying enough attention to be polite and — in all likelihood — would rather not be talking at all.

It’s important to realize that this isn’t a measure of interest in you, just in the conversation. There are any number of reasons why the other person doesn’t want to talk right now. They could be distracted with something at work. They could be having more than one conversation the same time and have only so much bandwidth to spare.

Or they could be

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