 Back in 2007, I met this girl at a swing dance bar in Denver, Colorado and we chatted a little bit. I got her number and then we started messaging each other the next day. And while we were messaging each other, I ended up going to and taking a shower and when I got back out of the shower I looked at my phone and she had messaged me something like seven or ten times since I went into the shower and the conversation was like her having a conversation with herself. She like asked a question and then she commented on it and then she said a few things and then she was like, why aren't you responding to me? And then it was like, if you don't like me, you can just tell me and all this other stuff, right? And this happened in a matter of 15 minutes and she didn't realize but she was lowering her value in my eyes by doing this. She was making herself less attractive by the things that she was saying. And now you may be thinking, that's great, Matt, but this guy that I've been talking to hasn't messaged me. It's been a lot longer than 15 minutes since he messaged me. What should I do? Well, I'm going to tell you exactly what you should do if a guy hasn't messaged you back or if he's ignoring you or something like that over text message. But first let's talk about some of the reasons why guys don't message back. First one is that he's busy with something. Second is he doesn't really like texting. Third is he thinks that you're acting needy and so he's feeling less attracted to you. Fourth is that he really isn't all that into you in the first place. Number five is that he's not near his phone. Number six is that he's with another girl. And ultimately what all of these boil down to is that you're just not a priority to him at this moment. And so although it might you might be a priority to him at other moments, but at this moment, you're just not a priority to him. So before we talk about exactly what you should do, let's talk about what doesn't work when messaging men when when he hasn't responded to your text message. What doesn't work. Number one is chasing him. Don't chase men never chase a guy right men value things that they work for best case scenario here if you start chasing him and messaging him all the time and what are you doing and trying to contact him and setting things up and start doing everything best case scenario is that he'll run away. Why is that the best case scenario? Because the worst case scenario is that you'll start doing everything in the relationship and he'll start taking you for granted which is what happens in most scenarios when women do this with men. So what you want is for him to be pursuing you him to be chasing you him to be investing in you because when he's doing that with you, he'll start to value you more. He'll feel like you're amazing and interesting and different. And he won't take you he won't end up taking you for granted. And if something does end up going wrong, you'll know about it immediately. If you don't, if you're the one chasing him, a lot of guys, even if they lose interest or lose attraction for you, they in your pursuing them, they'll just let you do it. And so you don't want to be in that situation. Number two is games and manipulation. So games and manipulation don't work. They only work temporarily if they do it all. And when you do that, when you start playing games, usually the guy starts playing games as well. And then you're just playing games with each other forever. And you have to play a game in order for him to stay interested. And so you don't want to play games and you don't want to use manipulation. The third one that doesn't work is shaming or condemning him. And the reason that you don't want to do this is because if he's really a high value man, what he'll end up doing is walking away from you. And if he's not a really high value man, and he decides that he wants to stay and deal with your shaming and condemning, what he'll end up doing is feeling a lot of resentment for you a lot of anger towards you and you don't want to do that. And then the fourth thing that you don't want to do is attacking or getting any kind of revenge on him. This is really just creating a cycle of hurting each other because you're going to hurt him. And then he's going to be angry and feel resentful towards you. And then he's going to try to hurt you. And it's just going to be this cycle that spirals downward into an oblivion of something that you absolutely do not want to experience. So what does work? What should you do if a man is ignoring you? He doesn't text back to you. You sent him a message. And he doesn't text back. What should you do? Number one is you should give him some space. So there's something out there that I call the rubber band effect. And what it is, is it's like, imagine that you and the guy are in a rubber band together and you push him away from you and he snaps back towards you, right? And so that's kind of what you want to do is you want to give him that space, give him that space, because he can't miss you if you're around him all the time. And so if he's not doing what you want him to do, if he's pulling back a little bit, if he's ignoring you or whatever, you want to give him some space, just give him some space for at least a day or two or three, depending on what the situation is. And usually most guys will end up coming back in that period of time. If he hasn't done that, then we'll talk about what to do after that. But don't make him the center of your universe. What you want to do is have your own life outside of this man, you want to create your own identity, your own life, have your own passions, have things going on, have friends, have connections, have everything going on outside of your life so that the man isn't the center of your universe. You want him to be an addition to your life, not the center of it. And so the second thing that you want to do is praise him when he comes back. And a lot of women get really angry at me when I say this, because they're like, Oh, no, you know, you have to punish him and you got to tell him what he did wrong and all that kind of stuff. Well, anybody, any kind of animal trainer out there, whether it's dog trainers or cat trainers or anyone, they know that if an animal runs off, he runs away, you do not punish that animal when it comes back, because you're punishing the good behavior, the bad behaviors running away, the good behaviors coming back. So you don't punish the good behavior, or the person, the animal, the whatever will stop doing the good behavior. And you might be thinking, Well, he's not an animal. Well, we're all animals, right? And so we all behave in a similar way, and we go towards things that we are rewarded for going towards, and we stay away from things that were punished for going towards. And so you want to praise him when he comes back, you want to let him know that you like him, you want to let him know that you appreciate him coming back to you and that you like hearing his voice and that you like him contacting you, if you want him to continue doing that more in the future. And so what do you do if you've given him some space and you and he still hasn't come back? So we're talking about that a little bit earlier. And basically what you want to do is you want to test him. And so some women think that a man has ghosted them, right? So a guy like stops contacting them for a day or two, or three or four, and they're like, Oh my God, he ghosted me. Well, it's really interesting because I have women come to me with this challenge all the time. And they're like, man, this guy ghosted me. And you know, what should I do in the future? And I'm like, are you sure? Are you sure he ghosted you? Are you are you positive that he ghosted you? And they're like, Well, what do you mean? And I have them send a text message to that guy. And what happens a lot of the time is the guy ends up responding and thinking that she actually ghosted him. And so it's it's not always the case that or or a lot of times he'll think that she's not interested because she's like leaning back too far and and trying to get him to pursue her. But she's she hasn't shown any interest or any of that kind of stuff because there's other dating coaches out there that teach that kind of nonsense. And you don't want to do that, right? Instead, if the guy has kind of disappeared for a little bit, you send a message and he hasn't responded for a while. And it's been a couple of days. You want to send him a message just to test what's going on and see what's going on. You don't want to start pursuing him at that point. You don't want to start chasing him and doing everything. But you can test the waters and find out what's going on with him just to make sure that he's okay, just to see if he wants to start connecting with you again, just to make sure that he doesn't think that you ended up ghosting him. And so I actually have a forward text message that's designed when a man pulls away or ghosts or disappears on you that you can send to him that gets his attention and makes him realize that pulling away from you was a mistake. A lot of women that have sent this message to guys, the guys actually responded and apologized for pulling away and taking these women out for dinner or drinks or all kinds of different things in order to make up for pulling away in the first place. If you want to know what that forward text message is, click the button on the right hand side of this screen to watch a video about it right now.