Raya's Rules on Self-Promotion and Oversharing

Raya's terms say the app is for personal use only. You cannot promote a business, ask a member for payment, or use anything you learn on Raya to contact or sell to her without her explicit consent. The terms also ban oversharing. That means contact or posts that could reasonably be uncomfortable or annoying for someone. The same goes for anything antagonistic or overly promotional.

The personal-use rule is wider than most men assume.

The obvious cases are easy to spot. A link to your restaurant, a discount code for your gym, an invitation to a paid event, a pitch for the fund you are raising. Each one promotes a business, and each one is out.

The quieter cases catch more people. Asking a woman to back your project, book your services or "just take a look" at something you sell is soliciting payment, even when it arrives halfway through a friendly chat. So is treating a good conversation as a warm lead. If the point of the message is that she ends up buying from you, it does not belong on Raya.

None of this stops you saying what you do. "I run a small coffee roastery" is a fact about your life. "Come by, your first bag is half off" is a sale.

The part men rarely think about is the last clause. You cannot use information from Raya to contact or sell to a member without her explicit consent.

That rules out a few common moves. She stops replying, so you look her up on Instagram and write to her there. You recognize her company from her page and email her at work. You pass her name to a friend who wants to pitch her. Each time, you took something she shared inside Raya and used it outside Raya without asking.

Explicit consent is a plain test. If she says "follow me on Instagram" or gives you her number, you have it. If she has not said so, you do not. Silence on the app is an answer, and following her to another app to ask again is exactly the contact this rule exists to stop.

Raya describes oversharing with four words, and each one covers a different mistake.

Uncomfortable covers messages that move faster than the conversation has earned. Sexual comments before you have met, pushing for her address, or demanding to know why she went quiet all belong here. Annoying covers volume: a message every day she has not answered, or five in a row before she has replied to one. Antagonistic covers anything that picks a fight, like arguing with a woman who turned you down. Overly promotional loops back to selling, and that includes selling yourself too hard.

Notice the word "reasonably" in the terms. The test is not whether you meant well. It is how a reasonable person on the other end would feel.

Most men who break this rule are not being rude. They are being eager.

The most common version is the wall of text. a dating coach's texting advice is to keep messages short, because a screen full of your words with nothing coming back reads as needy and a little unsettling. dating advice coach Hector Castillo makes the same point from her side of the phone. Faced with a long block of text, a woman tends to skip to the next conversation instead of reading it.

The second version is the follow-up that never stops. Castillo has no problem with a man writing again after a woman goes quiet. What he warns against is sending the same "hey, how are you" a few hours later. Wait a few days, send something different, and send it once.

The third version is oversharing about yourself. A painful story in the second message is too much, and so is your whole résumé in the first.

Here the rule and good dating advice point the same way.

a dating coach's view is that the things that look impressive on paper, the titles and the awards, rarely do much for a woman on an app. If your success comes up, it works best in passing, as part of a story about your weekend, never as the headline. A man who opens with his company is running a pitch. Raya's rule only makes official what she would feel anyway.

So talk about what you did rather than what you own. "Just got back from a week of diving in Belize" says more about an evening with you than a job title does, and nobody mistakes it for a sales call.

A message that stays well clear of both rules usually looks like this.

It is a sentence or two long. It responds to one thing she chose to share: her song, a photo, a line she wrote. It ends with a question she can answer quickly. After a few easy exchanges, it suggests a plan to meet. a dating coach's warning about app conversations holds on Raya too. Every extra day of chatting without a plan gives her more time to meet someone else or drift off the app.

If she stops replying, send one light follow-up a few days later, then let it go. Do not go looking for her anywhere else. Raya's whole appeal is a smaller, more private room, and the men who respect that are the ones women keep talking to.