How long to wait to text back (short answer: don't wait on purpose).

Reply when you'd reply anyway. If you've seen the message, you want to answer it and you've got a minute, answer it. If you're on the Tube with no signal or halfway through a shift, answer when you're out.

That's our whole position on how long to wait to text back, and we're sticking to it. The waiting rules people pass around (three hours, three days, twice as long as they took) all try to solve the same problem, which is how to look less keen than you are. We don't think that's a problem worth solving.

Why the waiting game backfires

Timing games work on the wrong people. If someone is only interested while you seem a bit unavailable, then the moment you stop playing hard to get they drift off, and you've spent weeks auditioning for something that needs you to keep up the act indefinitely.

The other problem is momentum. A conversation that's going well has a rhythm to it: they send something funny, you reply while it's still funny. Sit on it for four hours so you look busy and by the time you answer, the joke's gone cold and you're both back to "how's your week going".

Nobody, as far as we know, has ever fallen for someone because of a timestamp.

Times it's fine to be slow

Being slow and being strategic aren't the same thing. You might be at work, or watching a film you want to actually watch. That's life, and anyone worth texting has one too.

Sometimes you need to think. If they've asked something that deserves a proper answer ("so what happened with your dad in the end?"), it's fine to wait until you can give one, instead of firing off half a reply from the queue at Tesco.

It's 2am and you're three glasses in. Wait.

And sometimes you're not sure you want to keep talking. Take your time with that, but not forever. A week of silence is technically an answer; a kind "I don't think this is going anywhere, but it was nice chatting" is a better one, and it takes about ten seconds to type.

When you do come back after a slow patch, you don't owe anyone an essay. "Sorry, mad day" and then the actual reply is plenty. Three paragraphs about why you didn't answer turns the gap into the topic.

What their reply time tells you (not much)

People read an enormous amount into reply speed. Twenty minutes means they're cooling off. Two minutes means they're keen. A read receipt with nothing after it means they've met someone else. Usually it means their phone was in the other room, or they read it on the loo and forgot.

The pattern tells you more than any single gap. Someone who takes a day to reply but always replies properly, with a question and a bit of their own life, is interested. Someone who replies instantly with "lol" every time is fast, and that's about all you can say about them.

If the gaps keep getting longer while the replies get shorter, that's worth noticing. It's also worth one clear question instead of a week of guessing. We wrote more about the good signs in green flags over text.

Companions who reply later

We built Itclickt so companions text at a human pace. You see them typing, they usually send a few short bubbles instead of one tidy paragraph, and because they've got jobs and lives of their own, sometimes they reply later. Like this:

We went back and forth on that. An AI could reply in half a second, every time, and plenty of chat apps do exactly that. But instant replies at 3am are one of the things that make a chat feel like a machine, and in our testing a gap now and then made conversations feel more normal, to us at least. If you tend to spiral when someone goes quiet, it's a low-stakes place to practise not reading a gap as a verdict.

Match their pace, roughly

Not to the minute. But if they send one message most evenings, twelve replies inside an hour can feel like a lot, and if they're sending ten bubbles a minute, one careful paragraph every morning can read as cool. Meet somewhere in the middle and let it settle. People who get on tend to drift into a similar tempo without trying, which is a better sign than anything you could engineer.

Double texting is allowed

Sending a second message before they've answered the first used to be treated as a disaster. It isn't one. A double text is fine when it adds something:

• "also the bakery on the corner does cardamom buns on Fridays now"
• "update: the cat has got into the cupboard again"
• "ok I looked it up and you were right about the capital of Australia, I'm devastated"
• "wait, what was that film you mentioned?"

It's not fine when all it does is ask why they haven't replied. "??" and "guess you're busy then" both punish the other person for having a life, and they tend to get the slow reply they were complaining about.

One follow-up after a quiet day or two is normal. Three in a row with nothing back is a monologue, and at that point you're into restarting a dead conversation, which is its own thing.

If you remember the name of the film at 11.40pm, send it at 11.40pm.