We’ve all been there: staring at our cell phone, waiting for the optimistic chime of a text message or reeling with anxiety as that timely email filters through the clouds of the e-communication abyss. Those moments of waiting in between communication with a new flame can seem like a horrible torture of the senses.
A question asked all too often in the dating world seems to be: how long do you wait to contact a prospect after you’ve met or communicated for the first time? As I study the effects of marketing communication on a daily basis, this topic is increasingly interesting to me.
It is becoming more difficult than ever to be a “hidden dater.” As the worlds of Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., collide, the barriers of communication become fewer and blazingly obtrusive. This said, there are fewer reasons allowed for there to be too much time between communication in a new dating relationship. With one click of a mouse or roll of a track ball, you can send real-time messages instantly, meaning, the recipient can know immediately of your interest—or lack thereof.
Can you imagine the dating world of years ago? Our grandmothers likely waited days, perhaps weeks, to hear from a new beau after a beautiful evening at the local outdoor movie cinema. Following the notorious pony express, in the event that a woman and her family were well off enough to have a household phone system, the first calls were community-based—meaning that any incoming call could be picked up (and listened to) by anyone on the same land line throughout the township. Talk about neighborhood gossip ...
From our grandmothers to our mothers, it’s difficult to fathom the point in time when we did not carry cell phones in our purses and on our hips. Our mothers likely waited many hours, even days, to hear from their men. Can you imagine? If you happened to wander out to hit up the local Jane Fonda Jazzercize session and missed his call while you were away?! Forget email or even answering machines—at that time, the telephone was the only tried-and-true method of outreach.
As evolution has offered us communication portals that infiltrate nearly every figment of our being, we have bridged the wrinkle in the waiting game and must understand that unless your gentleman is on a non-WiFi flight to Hong Kong—or perhaps trapped underground on a tour of hidden Mayan tunnels—the “waiting game” should be nonexistent.
