What To Say In Your First Message

The first message is the part people put off longest, and it is the part that matters least. It does not have to be clever. It has to be easy to answer.

That is the whole trick. Most first messages fail not because they are badly written but because there is nothing in them for the other person to reply to. Here is how to avoid that.

Show that you read the profile

"Hola, ¿cómo estás?" is polite and gets nowhere, because it could have been sent to two hundred people and probably was. Anyone who has been on a dating site for a fortnight can tell the difference immediately.

Pick one thing from their profile and ask about it. If she mentions she has started singing in a choir, ask what they are rehearsing. If he says he spent thirty years on the railways, ask where. One specific detail is worth more than four sentences about yourself, and it proves you actually looked.

Keep it short

Three or four sentences. Enough to be a message, not so much that answering it feels like homework.

Long opening messages tend to arrive from people who are nervous, and they put the reader in an awkward position, because a page deserves a page back and most people do not have one ready. A short message is a small, easy door.

Ask something they can actually answer

The most common mistake by far. "You look lovely" is kind and leaves the other person with nothing to do but say thank you.

Ask something open. Not "do you like Bariloche" but "what took you to Bariloche". Not "do you cook" but "what do you make when you cannot be bothered". One question is enough. Three in a row reads like a form.

Sound like yourself

Write the way you would speak to somebody you had just been introduced to. Not stiff, not overfamiliar. If you would use vos with them in person, use it here.

Be careful with humour in the first message. Not because you should not be funny, but because dry humour without a face or a tone of voice attached lands very differently on a screen than it does across a table. Anything ironic is worth reading back once as if you were in a bad mood, to see how it looks from there. Keep the teasing for when you know each other.

Say who you are, briefly

A line is enough. Your name and one thing, tied to whatever you just asked about. "Soy Jorge, I did the same walk two years ago and still think about it." That is all the introduction a first message needs. The rest is what the profile is for.

Then leave it

The hardest part. Send it and get on with your day.

People do not reply for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with you. They are away, they are busy with the grandchildren, they joined a fortnight ago and have gone quiet, they were already talking to somebody. Do not send a second message asking why they have not answered the first. It never once in the history of this has worked.

Write to several people rather than pinning everything on one. That is not being fickle, it is just sensible, and it takes the weight off any single message. It is the weight that makes people write badly.

And if they reply

Answer within a day or so if you can, and keep the messages roughly the same length as theirs. That sounds fussy but it is a good instinct: it means you are having a conversation rather than delivering a speech.

After a week or two of messages, suggest a coffee. There is a stage where writing back and forward stops telling you anything new, and plenty of people stay in it for months because it is comfortable. An hour in a café will tell you more than another forty messages will.

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