How to Tell If Someone Read Your eHarmony Message

Look at the check marks beside your message in the Messages section. One green check mark means your match has received it. Two green check marks mean your match has read it. If you only see one, the message has arrived but she has not read it yet.

eHarmony keeps this simple. In the Messages section, the green check marks beside a message tell you how far it has got.

• One green check: delivered. It reached her.
• Two green checks: read. She has opened it.

That is the whole system. Open the conversation and the checks tell you where your last message stands.

Two green checks tell you one fact: she saw it. They say nothing about what she thought of it, whether she means to answer, or when.

A read message with no reply can mean a dozen things. She read it on the train and meant to answer at home. She was at work. She liked it and wanted to write something good back. She has a lot of conversations going and yours slipped down the list. Or she is not interested. The two checks look exactly the same in every one of those cases.

So the information feels big and is actually small.

Checking whether a woman has read your message is one of the easiest ways to make yourself miserable on a dating site. Seeing that she read it and did not answer mostly causes worry, and worry does nothing useful for you.

Think about how it plays out. You send a good message at lunch. In the evening you see two green checks and no reply. Now you spend the night building theories around one small mark, and when you do write again, it comes out a little more anxious than it should.

Without the checks, you would have done the sensible thing anyway: got on with your evening and looked again tomorrow.

If she has read your message and gone quiet, do not treat it as a verdict. Give it a few days.

Then send one light follow-up that stands on its own. A callback to something she said, a small joke about the topic you were on, or a simple, specific idea for meeting all work. What does not work is "?", "did you see my message", or anything that points at the silence. Those make her feel checked on, and a woman who feels checked on rarely warms up.

If that single follow-up also gets nothing, let her go and put your attention on the conversations that are moving. Never send three unanswered messages in a row. Stacked messages read as pressure, whatever they say.

There are a couple of cases where the checks earn their place.

The first is when you have suggested a plan. If you asked whether Thursday works for a drink, it helps to know she has seen it before you book anything or keep the evening free.

The second is a conversation that has gone quiet for a while. Knowing she has not opened your last message tells you she may simply be away from the site, which is a different situation from a message she read and let go.

Outside those two, try not to look.

The checks tempt some men into playing games with their own replies. They see she read their message within minutes, so they wait a day to answer hers, to seem busy. Or they answer the instant they see two checks, to seem keen.

Neither helps. A woman is not timing you with a stopwatch, and a reply that arrives at an odd hour for tactical reasons usually reads as exactly that.

Answer when you have something good to say and the time to say it well. If that is five minutes after her message, fine. If it is that evening, also fine. What matters is that your reply is light, specific and easy to answer, and that it moves the conversation a step closer to meeting.

Read checks feel important when too much of the connection lives inside the site. Every silence feels loaded because the chat is all there is between you.

The fix is to shorten that stage. Keep the conversation light, bring up the idea of meeting early as a relaxed suggestion, and ask for her number within a handful of messages. Once you have a plan and a number, you will not care much when she opened a message. You will be busy deciding where to take her.