Text Message Game

Pretty much every day on The Attraction Forums, someone posts looking for advice on how to get together with a girl that is flaking on him. If this sounds like you, listen carefully. Usually the post goes like this:

I met this girl at such and such a place, and got her phone number. The next day I texted her saying “blah blah blah” and she replied back “yadda yadda yadda” then I replied “blah blah blah”

Usually at this point, I stop paying attention, but it usually continues for a few agonizing pages worth of inane text messages and then concludes like this;

Now, I’ve texted her with “whoop de do ding dong” and she hasn’t replied. What’s going on? I thought she liked me.

What’s going wrong, my friend is that text messaging is for poets, fourteen-year-old girls, and cowards. And let’s be honest, you are probably not a poet.

Now, my buddy Future happens to be an honest-to-goodness poet. He has amazing text conversations with women that curl their toes and make them fall in love with him through their blackberries. He also spends hours composing his text messages and has an annoying habit of reading them to me as if it were a Shakespearean sonnet. But Future likes texting women, and that’s why he puts a lot more effort into it than I will ever do.

But you, on the other hand, you are probably not a poet. Do you love the movie Twilight? If no, you’re probably not a fourteen-year-old girl either. That means you’re a coward, and you’ve been wasting some poor woman’s time by texting her while lacking the balls to actually call her up and move the relationship forward.

The purpose of talking to a woman on the phone, from a strictly game perspective, is to first, make her feel comfortable with meeting you in person again, and once that is achieved, to coax her out of her apartment and into some scenario where you can look cool in front of her and have a chance of bringing her back to your place.

And here lies the rub; texting is mostly useless at making a woman feel more comfortable with you. Unless you’re writing really intelligent and thoughtful texts, like Future does, you’re probably not creating any comfort at all. Actually, the more you appear on her cellphone as words on a screen, the more you are going to seem like one of those annoying acquaintances that always forwards you chain letters or that stupid talking paperclip from Microsoft Office.

For her to feel comfortable with you, for her to feel like she knows you, she needs to hear your voice. She needs to feel like you’re a chilled out, normal human being, who can hold a conversation and was apparently attractive enough to get her number in the first place. That means you need to suck it up, and call her. Go ahead and text her if you have a funny joke, or if you’re going to be late for your date, but if you want to build comfort and make her actually like you more, if you want to give her an emotional experience, you need to do it the old fashioned way – over the phone.