Imagine, you begin to have dating success. You finally get someone to reply to your online dating messages. You will exchange some messages and you will find yourself a real live date. Not only will you get a date, but you will have planned a location, groomed your caveman charm into a modicum of presentability, and made it there on time.

Using all of the skills you have acquired, the articles read, the practice, and your common sense, you are going to get through the first date. Your date will laugh, smile, and you will suavely get a nice hug as you walk them to their ride. You are even going to ask them to text you when they get home safely; they will!

There is now a substantial risk that, with the best of intentions, you will tear down what you have built by mishandling the communication after the first date. Not counting the dates you never got in the first place, the time between the first and second date is the riskiest time in the life of any dating interaction.

By planning for this stage of your dating journey, you can avoid making obvious errors in communicating with your prospective second date and preserve your hard work.

Unlike some of the other articles on this site, which are accessible to both sexes, this article was specifically requested by female readers for the benefit of male readers. Pay attention guys, women want you to know this. While every woman is different, you can do no harm to your dating success by following the general outline here. On the other hand, there is a high probability that be following your natural instincts you will get it wrong.

Too Much Too Soon

Women have complained that after going on a first date, that in the next day or so, they begin to get a steady stream of texts, even a call, relaying long family histories, detailed discussions of work, heartfelt recitals of life goals and hopes for the future.

Imagine if you were on the receiving end of this from a woman. At first the attention might be flattering but after the fourth or fifth text, the level of focus from the other person becomes a bit annoying and then it becomes somewhat disturbing. If you are in doubt: annoying and disturbing are not how you want to be seen if you want dating success or any success. Any interest the woman might have had in you may have been thoroughly extinguished.

While this behavior seems easy to avoid, it is actually a common trap to fall into. You would not be putting yourself out there in the dating world if you weren’t, to some degree, lonely and wanting companionship.

When you meet with someone for a date, and you are not immediately and firmly rejected, you naturally respond with interest and a desire for further contact. However, even if there is a connection at this point, it is a tenuous one.

While your heart may be full of emotion and a sense of connection, you must ask yourself just who it is you are having these feelings for. Are your feelings for the person you had coffee with? That is somewhat unlikely given the short nature of the interaction. Maybe you exchanged some messaging before the date but be honest, you had coffee for an hour.

Consider, as a proposition, that your feelings are a combination of those few details you have learned about your date and a, much larger, component of your desires. The companionship, the intimacy, the regard that you want, all of these things could develop with your date but you have to understand that they have not developed yet.

The person who you’re flooding with attention is a real person but they probably aren’t the person you believe them to be. They cannot be because you haven’t had the time to learn all of the details that go into actually knowing someone.

If the woman was on the fence as to whether or not she was interested in you, an intense degree of attention may push her towards “no.” Even an interested woman may be pushed away if you completely overdo the communication.

Mastering the Ping – Texting a Woman After the First Date

If you have read other dating advice articles on this site then you know that you should have your second date in mind already when planning the first date. Don’t worry, you aren’t obligated to offer a second date if there is no chemistry on your first date. 

You need to have a ready-to-execute plan. Having that second date already asked for makes it a lot harder for a woman to say no. A woman who will dismiss your text message will have a much tougher time rejecting you to your face.

Having your second date set is one of the absolute best ways of not overdoing the messaging after the first date. When the second date is waiting in the wings, you have very little reason to communicate extensively between the dates. However, in addition to your “thank you for a nice time” message, you can also send, later in the week, a confirmation of your second date. As an aside, that message is never “are we still on,” but rather “i’ll be picking you up at 6, send me the address.” 

It is entirely ok to send a message that you had a good time. Do not overdo it. It was not the best time of your life unless you spent every day prior to your coffee date living in a cave eating bugs. If the date really did seem like the best thing that ever happened to you, keep working the process with this woman, but you seriously need to work on dating more.

The point is to communicate that you had a good time, and that it was nice to meet them; that is all you have to say until they respond. One of the wonderful things about texting, or application messaging if you are still using an online dating site, is that it comes with an option to delete what you have written, edit your message, or just not send it at all. Use these features to send a short, clear, message with a tone you’re comfortable with in language you have carefully considered.

A “ping” is a short, “hey, how are you,” message that allows a woman to respond, or not respond as it were, and that maintains a low level of contact without being intrusive. Pay very careful attention to the responses to your pings because they are going to dictate how things proceed.

If She’s Not Interested in Your Pings

If you do not get a response within the first ten minutes, wait at least a half day, and longer is better, to send the second one. Do not ever send repeated pings to a woman who does not respond. Like it or not, she is, in fact, responding to your messages and, rudely, telling you “no thanks.” Resist the temptation to have the last word, whether she is deserving of it or not, and just move on.

Never send more than two ping messages, even when separated by days without some sort of positive response. If you send a ping and you get back a terse thank you, wait a bit before sending another. Take note: if you keep getting back terse, one or two word responses then cut your losses and move on. An interested woman is one who will readily communicate with you.

There are certainly going to be cases in which the woman really favored you on your first date together, and actually is waiting for your call. In this situation, a “ping” approach works just as well here as with someone less enthusiastic. Without some artful probing, you cannot tell the difference with any degree of accuracy how a woman feels.

How Interested Women Respond to Pings

If a woman is interested, a ping gives her the opportunity to respond, to ask her questions, to do her own evaluation, without having to appear overly eager by moving first.

If you did not meet this woman in an online dating application, it is entirely possible she simply lost your contact information. Of course if you did meet through a dating app, versus scribbling phone numbers on receipts in a club, it is not really likely that she has lost your contact information.

If you send a ping and get a cheerful response, with a question or other invitation to continue attached, then feel free to engage in some communication. If she starts asking her own questions, after she answers yours, then you are cruising towards a great second date.

Even here, never overwhelm your prospects with attention. Match their texting frequency and volume as closely as you can. If they text every couple of hours, then you text every couple of hours. If they say “hi, how is your day going,” then go ahead and answer with a sentence of similar length; counting the words is probably excessive but do not answer a question about your day with a thousand word description of your job and all of its failings. As with other communications, always end yours with a question to keep things moving. 

Incidentally, this frequency and volume matching can work with anyone at any stage of a relationship. Instead of giving your partner the idea that you are immediately available, waiting a couple of minutes to answer texts gives the impression that you are breaking away from something else to pay attention to them; this can create more interest than being instantly available.

Matching their text volume can prod them to increase their volume in an attempt to engage further. With an established relationship however, be careful to keep the gamesmanship to a minimum. Waiting a minute to answer a text can be useful, waiting an hour is just irritating.

Easy to Remember, Easy to Do It Wrong

The key to successful dating is meticulous planning and execution. You can read all of the fairy tales about random encounters that you want, and spend your time hoping for something wonderful to happen to you- or you can follow the words of French scientist Louis Pasteur who said “chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Those wonderful things can, and do, happen in dating. If you are unprepared however, if you do not understand the situations in which they can happen, then you will not be prepared to take advantage of those pivotal moments.

This is not the most complex of concepts. Get your second date established as soon as possible, preferably at the first date while the woman is there with you. If you succeed in that, keep the messaging terse, limited to checking she got home safely and arranging second date pickup, unless she moves to expand the communication. She very well may if she’s interested.

If you did not get the second date set up while on your first date, and you’ve condemned yourself to getting her to go out again using only your communications skills, then be careful. Probe carefully with short messages and do not overwhelm her with contact.

Think before you message; are you communicating with the person in metaphorically front of you or are you imagining a degree of connection based upon what you want to exist, and which may yet exist, but which you do not yet share with this person.

Instead of projecting your desires onto what is essentially a stranger, send careful pings, spread out over time, to entice her into communication. Always focus on getting that second date.

If your pings do not result in responses or you get one or two word replies that trail off over time, then do yourself a favor and cut that person loose. There are a lot of women out there, you do not need to project onto an inappropriate one and you do not need to convince one that is not interested.

Managed carefully, you can get over this dangerous period and progress to the second and then the third dates where your communications will not only be accepted but where an interested and engaged woman will most likely encourage the more frequent and intense communication you want.

**Author Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article do not represent the views of the Social Security Administration or the United States Government. They are solely the views of Ted Stalcup in my personal capacity or as a representative of EmLovz. I am not acting as an agent of the Social Security Administration or the United States Government in this activity. There is no express or implied endorsement of Ted Stalcup or of EmLovz by either the Social Security Administration or the United States Government.