Is Silence Rejection With Online Dating?
Published on January 10, 2010
Is silence a form of rejection with dating online? If you email a woman and she doesn’t respond, is she not interested? Sadly, yes, silence is rejection when you are dating online. Actually, silence is a pretty bad sign regardless of whether you’re using an online dating site or a more traditional method.
The standard dilemma with online dating is the question: is it better to email someone back and reject them forcefully or just remain silent and allow them to forget about it. Having experienced both forms of rejection more times than I can remember when I was dating online, I can say that the second is far preferable.
Many people remain a little too hopeful and look for excuses as to why someone might not reply to their contact. Silence, though, is an absence of a response. And an absence of a response means that there isn’t enough interest to encourage the response. This, however indirect, ends up being rejection.
Reverse the situation and imagine someone you were interested in contacted you. Would you wait a week to write them back? Normally, no. A very small number of people believe they have to play games to get dates and may wait for a week to respond but they are the exception, not the rule. The rule is that when one person is interested in another, they’ll respond in a timely fashion. Even if someone you contacted did wait a week to get back to you, you have to then ask yourself this question: Am I willing to play games with my dating life? In either case, the lack of response is a bad sign.
As I said above, silence was my preferred method of rejection. Actually, when people have asked me for advice on whether they should directly reject someone, I have suggested silence as the best option.
My advice is to forget about the silence. A lack of responses is not the end of the world and there are many reasons it can happen (many of which have little or nothing to do with you).
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