Context is a huge factor in all these communications tips. The scenario I’m optimizing for is when you’re texting someone who has a lot of options, and you think it’s high expected value to get them to invest in a date with you, but the most likely way that won’t happen is if they hesitate to reply to you and tap away to something else. That’s not always the actual scenario though.
Imagine you’re the recipient, and the person who’s texting you met your minimum standard to match with, but is still a-priori probably not worth your time and effort going on a date with, because their expected attractiveness+compatibility score is too low, though you haven’t investigated enough to be confident yet. (This is a common epistemic state of e.g. a woman with attractive pics on a dating app that has more male users.)
Maybe the first match who asks you “how’s your week going” feels like a nice opportunity to ramble how you feel, and a nice sign that someone out there cares. But if that happens enough on an app, and the average date-worthiness of the people that it happens with is low, then the next person who sends it doesn’t make you want to ramble anymore. Because you know from experience that rambling into a momentumless conversation will just lead it to stagnate in its next momentumless point.
It’s nice when people care about you, but it quickly gets not so nice when a bunch of people with questionable date-appeal are trying to trade a cheap care signal for your scarce attention and dating resources.
If the person sending you the message has already distinguished themselves to you as “dateworthy”, e.g. by having one of the best pics and/or profile in your judgment, then “How’s your week going” will be a perfectly adequate message from them; in some cases maybe even an optimal message. You can just build rapport and check for basic red flags, then set up a date.
But if you’re not sold on the other person being dateworthy, and they start out from a lower-leverage position in the sense that they initially consider you more dateworthy than you consider them, then they better send a message that somehow adds value to you, to help them climb the dateworthiness gap.
But again, context is always the biggest factor, and context has a lot of detail. E.g. if you don’t consider someone dateworthy, but you’re in a scenario where someone just making conversation with you is adding value to you (e.g. not a ton of matches demanding your attention using the same unoriginal rapport-building gambit), then “How’s it going” can work great.
This is actually the default context if you’re brave enough to approach strangers you want to date in meatspace. The stranger can be much more physically attractive or higher initially-perceived dating market value than you. Yet just implicitly signaling your social confidence through boldness, body language, and friendly/fun way of speaking and acting, raises your dateworthiness significantly, and the real-world-interaction modality doesn’t have much competition these days, so the content of the conversation that leads up to a date can be super normal smalltalk like “How’s it going”.
Bonus points in a dating context: by being specific and authentic you drive away people who won’t be compatible. In the egg example, even if the second party knows nothing about the topic, they can continue the conversation with “I can barely boil water, so I always take a frozen meal in to work” or “I don’t like eggs, but I keep pb&j at my desk” or just swipe left and move on to the next match.
Context is a huge factor in all these communications tips. The scenario I’m optimizing for is when you’re texting someone who has a lot of options, and you think it’s high expected value to get them to invest in a date with you, but the most likely way that won’t happen is if they hesitate to reply to you and tap away to something else. That’s not always the actual scenario though.
Imagine you’re the recipient, and the person who’s texting you met your minimum standard to match with, but is still a-priori probably not worth your time and effort going on a date with, because their expected attractiveness+compatibility score is too low, though you haven’t investigated enough to be confident yet. (This is a common epistemic state of e.g. a woman with attractive pics on a dating app that has more male users.)
Maybe the first match who asks you “how’s your week going” feels like a nice opportunity to ramble how you feel, and a nice sign that someone out there cares. But if that happens enough on an app, and the average date-worthiness of the people that it happens with is low, then the next person who sends it doesn’t make you want to ramble anymore. Because you know from experience that rambling into a momentumless conversation will just lead it to stagnate in its next momentumless point.
It’s nice when people care about you, but it quickly gets not so nice when a bunch of people with questionable date-appeal are trying to trade a cheap care signal for your scarce attention and dating resources.
If the person sending you the message has already distinguished themselves to you as “dateworthy”, e.g. by having one of the best pics and/or profile in your judgment, then “How’s your week going” will be a perfectly adequate message from them; in some cases maybe even an optimal message. You can just build rapport and check for basic red flags, then set up a date.
But if you’re not sold on the other person being dateworthy, and they start out from a lower-leverage position in the sense that they initially consider you more dateworthy than you consider them, then they better send a message that somehow adds value to you, to help them climb the dateworthiness gap.
But again, context is always the biggest factor, and context has a lot of detail. E.g. if you don’t consider someone dateworthy, but you’re in a scenario where someone just making conversation with you is adding value to you (e.g. not a ton of matches demanding your attention using the same unoriginal rapport-building gambit), then “How’s it going” can work great.
This is actually the default context if you’re brave enough to approach strangers you want to date in meatspace. The stranger can be much more physically attractive or higher initially-perceived dating market value than you. Yet just implicitly signaling your social confidence through boldness, body language, and friendly/fun way of speaking and acting, raises your dateworthiness significantly, and the real-world-interaction modality doesn’t have much competition these days, so the content of the conversation that leads up to a date can be super normal smalltalk like “How’s it going”.
Bonus points in a dating context: by being specific and authentic you drive away people who won’t be compatible. In the egg example, even if the second party knows nothing about the topic, they can continue the conversation with “I can barely boil water, so I always take a frozen meal in to work” or “I don’t like eggs, but I keep pb&j at my desk” or just swipe left and move on to the next match.