When Should You Message Someone on POF?

Write to a Mutual Match the same day you match. Send a first contact to a woman you have not matched with when she can see it and answer it, which usually means an evening or a weekend. Plenty of Fish publishes no best hour, so we will not invent one. Because you only get one first message to a woman who has not matched with you, the timing matters more here than on most apps.

Plenty of Fish gives you two ways to start talking, and the timing advice is different for each.

A Mutual Match. You both liked each other in Meet Me, so she has already said yes to talking. You can send her unlimited messages. She is expecting to hear from you, and her interest is at its highest right after the match. a dating coach writes his first line within about a minute of a match, built on one specific detail from her page. You do not need to be that fast, but the same day is a good rule.

A first contact. You write to a woman you have not matched with. She can reply or like you back, and if she does neither you cannot send a follow-up. That makes it a single shot, so the moment you send it counts.

My rule for texting applies here almost word for word. Send a message when the woman can receive it and respond to it right away.

If it arrives while she is at work, it sits among her email and other notifications and gets less attention. If she sees it and cannot answer, she may put the phone in her pocket and forget. With a first contact, you then have no second message to fix it, and the silence you get is partly a timing problem you caused.

Evenings and weekends usually beat the middle of a workday. The middle of the night is the worst slot, because by morning your line sits under everything that arrived while she slept.

You will read claims about the best day and time to write on every dating app. We found no figure from Plenty of Fish, and we will not make one up. A woman's week depends on her job, her city and her habits, so the best hour for her is not the best hour for the next woman.

What you can do is run a small test. Send your first lines at different times for two weeks, one batch in the evening and one at the weekend, and note how many get a reply or a like back. Change the time, not the line, so you learn about timing and nothing else.

The question flips once she writes to you. My advice is not to answer instantly every time. A reply that always lands in ten seconds, he says, makes you look like a man sitting by his phone, and ten seconds can mean two or five minutes.

That is a rule about habit, not a delay to perform. If she is writing back quickly and you are both free, matching her pace is fine, and so is a fast back and forth when you are settling a plan for that day. If you normally take a few hours, taking a few hours is normal. Do not copy a slow woman by waiting two days, which coach calls ridiculous. Give a quiet day a few hours, not a few days.

Late in the evening, with no plan to meet that night, coach often stops the conversation and picks it up in the morning, as though he had been busy or asleep. It gives her room to wonder where you went, and sometimes she writes first.

You are not required to do this every night. Use it when the chat has run all day and nothing needs to be settled before tomorrow.

On Plenty of Fish you cannot send a second message to a woman who has not replied or liked you back. Treat silence as a no for now. She may rarely open her inbox, she may have had a busy week, or she may not be interested, and you will never know which.

Do not look for her on another app or on social media. A quiet no becomes a reason to block you the moment you do. Put the next hour into a woman who has said yes.

The common timing mistake on Plenty of Fish has nothing to do with the hour. Men collect Mutual Matches and write to half of them days later, when her interest has cooled and his has too. Check Meet Me and your inbox daily, and write to a match while you still remember what you liked about her page.

Remember also that conversations older than 30 days leave the inbox. A chat you plan to come back to in a month may simply be gone, and a woman who deletes her account takes hers with it. A phone number does not disappear.

1. Check Meet Me for new Mutual Matches and write to each one the same day.
2. Send first contacts in the evening or on a weekend, one specific line each.
3. Answer her replies within a few hours, not within seconds and not within days.
4. When the chat is going well, suggest a day and a place within about four to seven messages and swap numbers.

The message does its work in the first line. The timing only has to avoid making her job harder.