How to respond to "hey" (and why it's not the crime people say it is).

Send "hey" back, then add one thing. That's most of the answer. "hey! ok, important question first: is that your dog or a borrowed dog" does everything a reply needs to do, and it took about eight seconds to write.

The rest of this is us defending "hey", because it gets a hard time. Dating advice treats it like a character flaw, the lazy opener of someone who couldn't be bothered to read your profile. Sometimes it is. More often, we think, it's someone who liked you, opened the chat, stared at an empty box for a minute and went with the one word they couldn't get wrong. That's nerves more than laziness. A "hey" means they want to talk and have left the first topic to you, which, if you're any good at picking topics, is a gift.

What to send back

Match the "hey", then give them something to answer. The second part matters much more than the first. Some that work, depending on how much energy you've got:

• "hey :) what's the story behind the photo with the goat"
• "hey yourself. how's your Tuesday going, on a scale of cold coffee to great"
• "hey! you're the first person today who hasn't opened with a pun about my name"
• "heyy. ok I have to ask about the bread in photo two"
• "hey. I'm going to need your most controversial food opinion"
• "hello. you've gone for the classic, so I'm going for the classic: what are you up to tonight"

Notice none of them are "hey, how are you?" That's a fine question in person and a dead end in text, because the honest answer is "good, you?" and then you're both back where you started with one extra message each.

Profile details are your best material. If they've got a guitar, a surfboard, a very small nephew in one photo, ask about that. If their profile is empty, make a guess about them and let them correct you. Being guessed about is surprisingly hard to ignore. Our list of first message examples has thirty more, sorted by what's on the profile, and most of them work just as well as a reply to "hey".

"Hey" is only a problem when it keeps happening

One "hey" is an opener. The trouble starts when it's the only move they've got.

You reply with a proper question and get "haha yeah" back. You ask something else and get "lol". Three messages in, you've written 60 words and they've written four. That's someone who wants a conversation to happen near them without being in it, and it's fair to stop carrying it. Two decent attempts is plenty, in our view. If nothing comes back with a question in it, you're allowed to let it go. We've written more about what that looks like in how to keep a conversation going over text.

The other bad "hey" is the one sent to you and, you strongly suspect, forty other people at the same moment. You can't prove it. You also don't need to. Reply to it the same way you'd reply to any "hey", and if the next message is just as generic, you have your answer.

Heyyy, hey stranger and the other variants

People read a lot into extra letters. We'd read a bit less.

"hey" is neutral. "heyy" is usually just friendly. "heyyyy" with five y's is probably somebody in a good mood, possibly at a bar. Counting y's is fun but not a science, and some people type like that to everyone, including their mum.

"hey you" is warmer and a little flirty, usually from someone you've talked to before.

"hey stranger" means they know it's been a while and they're owning it. You can play along ("stranger is right, I thought you'd moved to a lighthouse") or skip straight to a question. If you want to be the one who does the reviving, there's a separate piece on how to restart a dead conversation.

And "hey." with a full stop can land cold, especially from someone who normally doesn't use punctuation. It can also just mean their phone auto-punctuates. Ask them something before you decide what it means.

Practising the reply

The hard part of answering "hey" is coming up with the second half fast, while you're a bit nervous, without overthinking it. That's a skill, and it gets easier with reps. One of the things we like using Itclickt for is exactly this: the companions are AI (we're upfront about that from the sign-up screen), they have detailed profiles to pull topics from, and some of them will call you out if you're dull.

Charlie is a wedding DJ in Manchester, so the question was sitting right there on his profile. That's the whole trick, over and over.

You don't have to reply at all

If you're not interested, you can leave a "hey" unanswered. It cost them one word to send, and silence is a normal answer to one word on a dating app. If they send a second message that's actually about you, that's a different situation, and a short "thanks, but I don't think we're a fit" is kind and takes ten seconds.

If you are interested and just stuck, reply with "hey" and the first real question that comes into your head, even a silly one. Ours, most evenings, is "hey. milk in first or after?" People have views.