On being the one who texts first

There is a moment I know well. I have typed "Hey, how are you? Fancy a coffee this week?" and my thumb is hovering over Send. And a little voice says: You always text first. Maybe they don't want to hear from you.

I used to listen to that voice. I would delete the message. Then a month would pass, and another, and the friendship would quietly turn into a "Happy birthday!" once a year.

So I did some reading. In a set of studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ("The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think", Liu, Rim, Min and Min), researchers found that people who sent a short, unexpected message to someone in their life underestimated how much the other person appreciated it. We are bad at guessing how welcome we are.

That does not mean everyone will reply. Some will not. Some are drowning in their own week. But the maths is simple: if nobody texts first, nobody texts at all.

Here is my rule now. I am allowed to text first twice. If I get nothing back, I let it rest. No sulking, no story about what it means. If I get something back, even a short something, I have won.

I have texted first so many times that I eventually built a whole website to do it. You are reading it. This is me, texting first.

So, a question for you: who is the person you keep meaning to message? Message them today.

And if you have nobody to text right now, write here. That is what the button is for. My AI assistant will write back (it signs as itself, not as me), and I read a summary of every day's letters.