How Many First Messages Should You Send on a Dating App?

Send one first message to each woman, and send it to every match you would be glad to meet. If you are asking how many first messages to send a day, the honest answer is as many as you can write well, which for most men is a handful at one sitting. If you are asking how many to send a single woman, the answer is one, plus at most one light follow-up later.

A first message is a single try at starting a conversation. It is not the first of a series.

When a man sends a second and third message to a woman who has not answered the first, nothing new has happened on her side. She has not read more about him or changed her mind. All she sees is a stack of his messages with no reply in between, and that stack reads as pressure.

So put your effort into the one message. Read what she wrote, pick one specific thing, and say something short about it. Then leave it alone.

Many men ask this question because they are staring at a match who never replied. Give it time first. A woman may have a lot of unread messages, and she may open the app twice a week.

If a few days pass and you still want to talk to her, one short follow-up is fair. Make it different from the first, not a nudge. A new, light remark about something else on her page works. A message that says "hello?" or "did you see my message?" does not.

After that, move on. Her silence tells you what her answer is, and your time is better spent on the next match.

The number that matters is the one you can keep up while still writing each message for the woman it goes to.

a dating coach's advice is that consistency beats cramming. A short session every day tends to get better results than one long session in a single day, and the first half hour you spend on a given day is worth far more than the sixth. So a few minutes of careful messages each day beats an hour of copied lines on Sunday night.

If you have many matches waiting, do not send a pasted opener to all of them. A line that could go to any of them will read like one that was sent to all of them. Message the women you would honestly like to meet and write each message by hand.

A first message has one job, which is to get her to write back. The chat after that has a different job, which is to get her off the app and into a plan.

My own conversations run to about four to seven messages from her first reply to a number and a plan. Every message in that stretch has a purpose and moves things toward meeting. That is why a long run of first messages is the wrong thing to count. The number to watch is how many of your messages turn into real conversations, and how many of those turn into dates.

Keep a simple tally for two weeks. Write down how many first messages you sent, how many were answered, and how many of those chats reached a plan.

If you send plenty and almost none are answered, sending more will not fix it. Look at your pictures first, since a first message cannot rescue a lead picture that did not earn the match. If the picture is fine, shorten your messages and make each one about one detail on her page, then count again.

If most are answered and few reach a plan, the problem is later in the chat, and more first messages would only give you more chats that stall at the same place.

Sending fewer, better messages is almost always the right change. A man who writes ten careful messages a day is likely to get more answers than one who sends forty identical ones. He will also have time to reply to the women who write back.

Pick a number you can sustain, write each message for the woman it goes to, send one, and let her answer decide what happens next.