There’s an art and science to texting on dating apps. Hone your skills or get ghosted

Illustration by Prajna Ghosh | ThePrint

First comes the swipe. Then the type. Yes, the dreaded texting that follows. This is the heart of the modern dating game. Type, delete, type again, send the text, and wait for a reply—that’s basically the whole deal of modern dating. Texting is now both kryptonite and the lifeblood of love. Forget finding a match on Bumble, Tinder or whatever glorified trash you can swipe through if you can’t keep a chat going. And then spend hours decoding every message with the army of deep tech, friends, and strangers on the internet—because even a simple ‘sup’ could have 1,000 different meanings. Ask any tormented Gen Z romantic, WhatsApp is their personal hell. 

The chatbox is where love flourishes, festers, and flatlines. In my version of a romantic tragedy, the opening scene has a hunched-over Hinge hopeful, drafting a killer opener DM to land a date. Sweaty palms, heart doing somersaults at the sight of ‘typing…’ – those three dots – and the dread of being seenzoned, ghosted—you know, just a regular Tuesday in the dating trenches. 

To survive in the game, one must hone their DMing skills, study the other person’s texting behaviour, mirror their energy, and avoid a few million minefields. For example, don’t just say ‘hi’. You’d be surprised how many talking stages die prematurely because of these two innocent letters.

The sacred laws of texting  

Yes, there’s an art and science to this texting on dating apps.  

As per the sacred laws of texting—revised weekly by hot new listicles—true love is measured in good morning messages. Bonus points if you’re the first notification they wake up to. But to my 26-year-old mate from school, this level of daily text exchange feels as annoying as customer service calls. Can’t blame her. After going through the GM-GN ritual with five different guys in one year, she’s justifiably tired. Someone like her recently started a burning debate on X by posting, “Dating doesn’t mean we need to talk daily!” Let’s just say it’s currently too radical an idea for relationshipers to get behind. 

When so much is riding on the DM game, bad texters are basically fighting for their lives. No matter how charming they are in person, their on-text persona always reads drier than a digestive biscuit. They’re infamous for shutting down a conversation, often involuntarily, with a confusing ‘hmm’. A running joke is that only Lucky Ali can get away with it, everyone else just gets ghosted. 

In this hyper-self-aware online world where even a 10th grader is armed with misguided therapy-speak, these lousy texters also get yeeted into the ‘avoidant’ corner. A fancy new label for people who get spooked by intimacy and approach texting like a chess match—calculated, cautious, and always three moves away from disappearing. 

The only other category making waves? Anxious texters. Leave them on read for 20 mins and they will start posting sad songs on their Instagram Stories. Abandoned. Rejected. And catastrophically attached to texting tennis. They’ll spiral over double texting (because desperation is a crime), but that won’t stop them from firing off a third just to keep the chat (and their sanity) alive. It’s diabolical how they even agonise over emojis. A thumbs-up is enough to send them into a full-blown existential crisis. 

Buckle up

The politics of emoticons is anyway getting out of hand. Can you imagine breaking up with someone because they use the grinning emoji way too much? Not too wild an idea for a 23-year-old girl in Pune. The last guy she dated fared well for a month before he committed the final offence. She sent him a voice note of an Arijit Singh track playing on her bus ride—a smooth move—and he responded with a grinning emoji. Within thirty minutes, before he sent another verse of the same song to her, she had already mentally broken up twice. 

I guess, buckle up. Modern Juliets aren’t doing solo emotional labour anymore—not even over text. The chronic fear of being perceived as vulnerable forces us to stick to the nonchalant way of life. Maybe that’s why we text like we’re defusing bombs—because saying what we actually feel, feels… illegal. And it can easily be misinterpreted. Enter pebbling—the art of sending tiny tokens of affection over chat. A cat meme, a 1-am photo of conjoined garlic cloves captioned ‘Us’, and a blurry shot of the moon with no explanation. Sure, that’s also breadcrumbing but it’s also cute and largely consensual. 

After doing hard time in the texting penitentiary—drafting essays for emotionally unavailable men—I’ve finally learned to edit my paragraphs. My overused pebble, when I’m really, really touched, is a no-frills Nokia-era smiley. A colon followed by a closing bracket. That’s it. From there, it’s a slippery slope to 2 am drunk calls. Growth looks different for everyone.

Views are personal.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)