When should I respond if someone contacts me on an online dating site?
When to e-mail is a subjective thing. People always ask, "Should I wait or not wait?" I personally don't believe in games, and when I went online, I wanted to find someone I could have a serious relationship with. I'll tell you this story: when I went online, I met with five men and the fifth is my husband, but the fourth was in the running, too, for a while. What I found with my husband was when we finished a date, he wanted to know when we were having our next date. When I e-mailed him, he e-mailed me right back, whereas the fourth got caught up in - days would go by before he called and he'd end a date and just say goodnight without trying to book me another time, and I didn't have time to waste. I wanted to be with someone who wasn't going to play games and was going to be there when I was there, who was going to be honest in his responses to me, so I dropped the fourth guy. I dated the fifth guy, and I married the fifth guy. I feel sorry for the fourth guy, but that's the way it is. You can wait a number of days before you reply, but you might be e-mailing someone like me who's just going to move on and find someone who's not playing games and who shows they're interested and is interesting to be with. As online dating coaches, we have a lot of clients and some people are able to spend an hour a day on an online dating search, and some might only be able to do it on weekends, and so it's going to be different for everybody. In your correspondence, if you aren't able to email someone back immediately - say 24 hours - you should probably say that. You should probably say that in your ad, that you do your online dating on the weekends, because no one likes someone who plays games, and it is a numbers game, people are dating a lot of people. Do what feels best for you when online dating, but if it's something unusual, where you can only respond on weekends or once every two weeks, make sure to say that.
