Dating App Tips: When Should You Send That Second Text? Hinge Wants To Help

Dating can be nerve-racking, especially when you don’t know if you should send that second text.

After a person asked if texting someone twice to get his or her attention comes off as too desperate, the iOS dating app Hinge gave some advice on when you should send someone a second message.

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Molly Fedick, editor-in-chief fpr Hinge’s IRL blog, said double messaging on a dating app might not come off as too needy.

“I am one of those people who believes [believed?] double texting is one of the lamest things a person can do, at least in the ‘getting to know you' phase," Fedick said. “Here’s the thing though — dating apps aren’t ‘real life,’ if you consider ‘real life’ good old fashioned texting. In ‘real life,’ I still don’t advocate the double text to get someone’s attention. But on dating apps, it actually works.”

Double texting is seen as when a person sends an initial message and then sends another text after some time had passed, which means consecutive texts like “Hi. My name is John Doe” don’t count.

Hinge data researchers studied more than 300,000 conversations in a two-week timeframe in which double texts were sent. They found that if a second message was sent three hours and 52 minutes or more after the initial message, the recipient was more likely to respond than not.

If you wait more than that, you could still have some luck in finding love. Waiting up to a week to send a second message through a dating app could actually get you a response. That second message has a more than one in three chance of getting a response, analysis indicated, which is up from one in 500 if the second text was never sent.

“Bottom line? On dating apps, double texting actually does work, so message away,” Fedick advised.

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Hinge also looked at whether you should call someone after matching on a dating app, and it seems like it’s not a good idea.

“Phone calls make a lot of us millennials anxious AF,” Hinge IRL’s Gigi Engle said responding to a male user. “It’s not like the old days; people hate talking on the phone.”

Engle suggested not calling someone without asking first, adding it might be a little annoying getting a surprise call from someone you just started texting to on a dating app.

“Go with texting. It makes things simpler for everyone,” Engle said. “Once you’ve been on a few dates and actually know each other, I’m sure it will be easier to convince her to take voice calls.”

The advice could be useful for the 15 percent of American adults who have used online dating sites or mobile dating apps, Pew Research Center found. The number of 18- to 24 year olds who use online dating has nearly tripled from 10 percent in 2013 to 27 percent in 2016 while the number among 55- to 64 year olds doubled from 6 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2016.