How Important Is Texting in Dating?

Imagine someone messages you at a quarter to 1 on a Saturday night after not answering your last message two days ago. How are you responding?

And if someone triple texts you in the middle of a busy workday and calls you out for your slow reply: What then?

When it comes to the early stages of dating, there are different schools of thought when it comes to how quickly two people should respond to one another. And plenty can get lost in translation, especially when everyone has different styles of communicating. Without much to go off about the other person, a wacky smiley emoji or lack of lols can hold a disproportionate amount of weight.

Messaging practices when dating don’t just end at response times either. Other factors, like consistency, emoji usage and message length are all things many of us can’t help but obsess over. Some think of it as “having game.” Others think it’s playing games.

For Christina Kapinos, a 30-year-old buyer for an interior design firm in Boston, going slow in the early stages and avoiding excessive texting is important: “To be texting all day, it’s like you’re already in a relationship with somebody.”

“They can be not even interested in you that much — they’re just bored and want to talk with somebody,” she said, adding that she generally prefers phone calls over messaging.