Once you send someone an introductory message, OkCupid stops showing her to you in Discover or Questions until she Likes you back. The point is to keep you from spending time on people you have already contacted. A reply or a Like from her puts the conversation on your Conversations page, and you get a notification.

She hasn't gone anywhere

It is easy to read her disappearance as a verdict. You write to a woman, and a minute later she is gone from your feed. It looks like she blocked you or left the app.

Neither is necessarily true. OkCupid hid her from you, on purpose, because you have already made your approach. She is still on the app, and your Intro is still sitting with her. Nothing about her vanishing from your screen tells you what she thinks of your message.

Why OkCupid does it

Picture the app without this rule. You send a woman an Intro, and she keeps turning up in Discover and in Questions. You would see her again and again, wonder whether she has read it, and be tempted to Like her again or think up something else to say.

OkCupid removes that loop. Once you have contacted her, the ball is in her court, and the app clears her out of your way so you spend your attention on women you haven't reached yet.

Where her answer will show up

You don't have to hunt for her. If she Likes you back or replies, the conversation appears on your Conversations page and you get a notification.

So the right way to check is simply to open your Conversations page when the app tells you something happened. Scrolling Discover looking for her face won't help, because she won't be there until she has Liked you back.

The rule protects you from yourself

This is the part men underrate. The hiding rule stops one of the most common ways men ruin a good start online.

a dating coach warns against neediness in messaging. When a conversation goes quiet, many men send message after message to remind her they exist. It rarely works, and it can push her away for good, because nothing reads as less attractive than a man who can't wait a day.

On OkCupid, the app takes that option off the table. You sent your one Intro. Your job is done until she answers. Let the rule do its work and don't try to get around it.

Silence usually isn't about you

When you hear nothing back, remember what a woman's inbox looks like. coach points out that the more attractive the woman, the more men are writing to her. Some days she opens the app, answers two messages and closes it again. Some weeks she doesn't open it at all.

He also says a little patience goes a long way. A reply that comes after two days is still a reply. So give each Intro time, and don't draw conclusions from a quiet afternoon.

If she never answers, that is part of online dating too. Women online ignore far more men than they answer, and the men who do well accept that and keep going.

When most of your Intros go unanswered

One quiet woman tells you nothing. Twenty quiet women in a row tell you something about what you are sending.

My diagnosis of silence is blunt. The most common reason a woman stops answering is that the exchange is boring: too logical, too polite, a swap of facts with nothing playful in it. He also names neediness, and rushing, like asking her to a specific bar at a specific time before the idea of meeting has even come up.

So if your Intros mostly vanish, read the last ten you sent as if you were her. If they all open with a greeting and a question about her weekend, rewrite your approach. Lead with one specific detail from her page, add a little humor or a playful claim, and keep it to a line or two. Then compare how the next batch does.

Use the wait well

Since she is out of your feed, the best thing to do is exactly what OkCupid is nudging you toward: find the next woman worth writing to.

Keep your standards high as you do it. Like women you would genuinely be glad to take for a drink, read their pages, and send Intros that react to something specific they wrote. A short, playful line about one real detail gets far more answers than "hey" or a compliment on her looks.

And when someone does answer, move it along. My approach is to get from first message to a woman's number in four to seven messages. He brings up the idea of a drink early, as a light suggestion, so that asking for her number feels like the natural end of the conversation. The men who get dates on OkCupid are the ones with several good conversations going, not the ones refreshing their feed waiting for one woman to reappear.