What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before My Fortieth First Message

By my fortieth first message I could write them in my sleep, and frankly I think I did a couple. They had a shape: a compliment pretending to be an observation, a question pretending to be curious, and a joke wearing a trench coat so nobody would notice it was a joke. I was a professional. I was also, I eventually realized, extremely lonely in a very well-edited way.

If I could sit that younger version of me down, I would not give him a better opener. I would take away the opener entirely and ask him one thing: what are you hoping happens after she writes back? He'd have mumbled something about 'seeing where it goes,' which is what we say when we've refused to look at the map.

If I could sit that younger version of me down, I would not give him a better opener.

Here is the thing I wish I'd known. Nobody is grading the first message. The person on the other end is also standing in a kitchen holding a phone, also rereading their own punctuation, also privately hoping you'll be easy to talk to. Your cleverness impresses them far less than your calm. A plain 'Hi, your dog photo made my afternoon' beats a paragraph of wit every time.

I'd also tell him that rejection mostly isn't about him. Silence has a thousand boring causes: a dead battery, a bad week, a better match, a cousin's wedding. The story I wrote about each non-reply, that I was unlovable, too much, not enough, was fiction, and not even good fiction. My own copywriter's ego, hunting for drama.

And I'd tell him to keep going, softly. Not because the next message will be the one, but because the practice of reaching toward another person is the whole beautiful point. If you want a gentler place to loosen up while you do, the short romance dramas on TheFriend, like The Guest Upstairs Changed Everything, make a lovely evening of other people's complications. Tonight, let someone else's plot carry you for a while.