The Relationship Column
How Much Should You Text Between Dates?
A short, honest look at the between-dates window that most modern dating advice gets wrong.
You had a great date. Maybe two. You feel connected in person. And then, somewhere between one Tuesday and the following Saturday, you find yourself scrolling back through a text thread, counting minutes between replies, and rewriting a message three different ways before you send it.
This is one of the most common sources of low-grade dating anxiety I hear about in my work. It is rarely because texting itself is complicated. It is because texting has quietly become the space where most modern dating uncertainty lives.
You feel real chemistry on a Thursday evening. Then you have three or four days of pixels on a screen to interpret before you see the person again. That is a lot of interpretive space for the human nervous system to fill.
The Better Question to Ask
The honest answer is that there is no fixed rule for how often to text between dates. There is not a magic number, and any dating advice pretending otherwise is selling you certainty at the expense of accuracy.
But there is a better question you can ask. Instead of “How much should we be texting?” try “Is the texting building connection or draining it?”
That single reframe changes almost everything, because it moves the question from performance to presence. You stop trying to hit an invisible target for how often someone should be hearing from you, and you start noticing what is actually happening between the two of you.
Texting is not a relationship. It is the connective tissue between the moments that are.
What Healthy Early Texting Actually Looks Like
In my seventeenth year of matchmaking and date coaching across Toronto and the rest of Canada, I have watched thousands of early text threads either build something real or slowly bleed the energy out of it. The healthy ones tend to have a few things in common.
They feel consistent, not sporadic. There is a rhythm both people can predict, even if the rhythm is not daily.
Both people are participating. It is not one person carrying the entire thread with warm, effortful messages while the other sends back a thumbs up.
The thread leads somewhere. It moves toward the next date, or a shared piece of life, rather than looping endlessly through small talk that goes nowhere.
And it does not feel like an emotional test either person is trying to pass. When two people are just genuinely enjoying each other, they are not scoring the exchange.
If those four things are present, the actual volume matters much less than most people think. Some healthy early relationships text often. Some barely text at all between dates and it is completely fine. The volume is downstream of the connection, not the other way around.
Why Texting Feels Louder Than It Is
Here is the part that trips people up. Most of the anxiety about texting between dates is not really about the texting.
It is about not knowing where you stand.
When we do not yet know where we stand with someone new, the mind reaches for anything measurable. Reply speed. Length of message. Tone. Use of exclamation points versus periods. Whether they used your name. Whether they used an emoji.
None of those things are actually reliable signals about the other person’s feelings. But they are the only data your mind has access to during those long gaps between dates. So it clings. And a three-hour reply gap that means nothing starts to feel like emotional information when it is really just someone in a meeting they did not choose.
This anxious activation is not a personal failing. It is how the human nervous system responds to uncertainty about something we care about. The Cleveland Clinic’s overview of anxious attachment is a clear, grounded read on why uncertainty in early relationships can send some people into a physiological loop that has almost nothing to do with the person on the other end of the phone.
Recognizing it for what it is does not make it disappear. But it does stop you from mistaking your own anxiety for information about them.
Two Rules Worth Remembering
If I could give any client two working rules for early texting, they would be these.
First, respond as yourself.
If you are naturally a warm, expressive texter, do that. If you are naturally more measured and reserved, do that. Trying to match some invented pace, either playing it cooler than you feel or performing more enthusiasm than is real, usually backfires. It backfires because you stop being present in the exchange and start performing an imagined version of yourself. The person on the other end feels it, even if they cannot name what shifted.
The right person for you needs to like the actual you. Not the calibrated version you produce during the first three weeks.
Second, watch the pattern over two or three weeks, not any single day.
A great person can have a bad texting day. They can be sick. Slammed at work. Distracted by something in their family. Silent for a day and then warm the next. A single quiet stretch tells you very little.
A pattern of disappearing, going vague, becoming inconsistent, or making you chase is a completely different story. That pattern will show itself over time. And it will show itself with or without your close monitoring, which is worth remembering the next time you feel the urge to re-read a thread for the fourth time.
I have written before about how the mind fills in gaps with hope, in why do I get attached so quickly. Texting between dates is one of the places that happens fastest.
The No-BS Part
If you find yourself editing a text three times before sending it, that is usually not a texting problem.
That is an anxiety problem. And anxiety rarely gets better by picking a better word. It gets better with support in the moment, and with practice tolerating the discomfort of not knowing yet.
Most of the people I work with who struggle with early-dating texting are not bad at texting. They are people who feel a lot, who care about doing this well, and who have not yet built the internal steadiness that lets them send a message without immediately mining the response for meaning. That is a skill you can build. And it does not require you to feel less.
You do not need to text less. You need to trust yourself more.
What Slower, Steadier Texting Actually Looks Like
Slowing down is not playing hard to get, and it is not punishing yourself for feeling. It is letting your responses and your evidence walk at the same pace as your feelings.
In practice, it sounds like a few quiet checks you keep returning to. Is this message coming from a genuine impulse to connect, or from a need to close an uncomfortable open loop? Am I responding to what they actually said, or to what I am afraid it might mean? Would I still send this message if I did not need them to reply immediately?
It also means letting the natural silences of adult life be silences. Not everyone texts throughout their workday. Not everyone is emotionally available at 11pm. And a person who takes a few hours to reply is almost never trying to send you a message about your worth. They are usually just living their life.
When you stop treating every gap as data, you free up an enormous amount of energy that used to go into monitoring. That energy is much better spent being present on the next actual date. This is a pattern I also see in the psychology behind overthinking in modern dating. Texting is often where overthinking finds its favourite home.
What They’re Really Asking
When someone asks me how much they should be texting between dates, the question underneath is almost never about volume. It is this. How do I stay grounded when I do not yet know where I stand with someone?
That is a much harder and more honest question. And it is the one worth working on. Because the version of you that can sit with a quiet Tuesday afternoon, without needing a text to prove anything, is the version of you who dates well. Not because you have stopped caring. Because you have started trusting that caring is not the same thing as controlling.
If you tend to spiral in the gaps between dates, and you find yourself typing and retyping messages you never send, you are not broken. You are dating in a medium that was not designed for uncertainty, while trying to build something that requires you to tolerate a great deal of it.
The good news is that this gets easier. Both with practice, and with the right support. If it feels like the between-dates window is where you consistently lose your footing, that is exactly the moment I built my weekday text support program for. And if the texting itself is fine but you keep matching with people who leave you guessing, you may recognize yourself in if you keep attracting emotionally unavailable people, which is a different problem entirely, and one worth naming. You can also explore dating services if you would rather look at the whole picture.
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