Do OkCupid Matches Expire?

No. OkCupid's help pages describe a match as the result of two people Liking each other, and they describe no timer on it. A match does not run out because you waited a week to say hello. What can happen is that a conversation or an Intro disappears from your screen, and OkCupid lists the reasons it knows about.

When you and someone else both Like each other, OkCupid tells both of you for free, and the conversation shows up on your Messages or Conversations page. That page also holds the conversations with people you Liked first.

So a match is a mutual yes, not a reservation. Nothing in the help pages says it lapses, and nothing says you lose it for being quiet. If you want to know whether one is still live, open the conversation and see whether it is still there.

OkCupid says an Intro or a message can disappear for a short list of reasons. You blocked the other person, they blocked you, they deleted their account, their account is on a moderation hold, or they were banned.

The annoying part is that OkCupid generally cannot tell you which one it was. From your side, every one of them looks the same: she was there, and now she is not. Men usually assume the worst version, that she blocked them. In practice it is as likely to be a deleted account.

Do not spend an evening trying to work out which. You cannot find out, and the answer would not change what you do next, which is to open the next conversation.

Free members have a cap on how much their Conversations page can hold. It is large, and paid members have no cap. A free member whose mailbox is full gets an error when something new tries to arrive.

Most men never get near it. If you have been collecting conversations for years and never clearing them, it is one more reason a conversation might not appear where you expect. Clearing out the dead ones is a ten minute job, and it makes the live ones easier to find.

An Intro is a first message from someone you have not Liked yet. Liking her turns it into a conversation.

The Intros tab only shows Intros from accounts that are still active on OkCupid and that you have not passed on. If you passed on someone, her Intro leaves that tab. If her account closed, the Intro goes with it. That is the usual explanation when an Intro you remember seeing is missing.

OkCupid hides someone from your Discover after you send her an introductory message, until she Likes you back. This is a different effect from expiry, and it fools men who go looking for her later.

If you messaged her and she is no longer in Discover, nothing is wrong. OkCupid has stopped showing her because you already acted. Look in your conversations, not in Discover.

Nothing on the app expires, but a warm start still cools off. A woman who Liked you today is thinking about you today. A week later she has had other conversations, and your name is one of several.

coach, who has spent years teaching online dating, frames the whole thing as a series of ratios: matches, then conversations, then replies, then phone numbers, then dates. The point of the framing is to find which step is leaking. If you collect matches and send nothing, the leak is at the first message, and the fix is to message while the match is fresh.

So the rule is simple. Send something the same day, or the next morning. Refer to one real thing on her page, ask one question she can answer in a sentence, and leave out the long introduction about yourself.

A match with no reply is not an expired match. It is a conversation that has not started yet.

Send one follow-up a few days later, short and light, and then move on. Do not message a woman four times in a row to get an answer. If she is interested she will reply, and if she is not, three more messages will not change that.

Meanwhile keep the pipeline moving. Matches that do not expire are still worth less than conversations that actually run, and the only way to find out which ones run is to talk to many of them.