When He Doesn’t Text Back Immediately

I’ll spare you the back and forth, but I got some email from a female reader who was starting to over think things about why her husband was slow to respond to texts…

Athol:  Oh wow, your hamster is going 100mph. You’re having a disproportionate amount of contacts starting from your end, and that’s what’s driving you crazy. If you contact him three times for every once he contacts you, you’re going to get a little nutty about what everything means. He likely has no clue about any of this stuff in your head happening lol.

Let’s make a new rule for you and experiment for a week with it. You can only initiate a text contact with him once a day for a week. But you can respond to his texts for as many times as he sends them.  That should even out the balance.

He’ll text you after a while.

As I recall the golden rule as posed by Roissy is to contact her two times for every three times she contacts you. It’s still fairly constant contact, but makes her work for it (i.e. be emotionally engaged) just a little more. But as you can see a one to three ratio just makes it go from “stimulated” to “starting on the road to batshit crazy”. Specially sensitive as this reader is long distance as well.

I think in a marriage you can contact more frequently than the two to three ratio. Captains can’t actually lead First Officers on a two to three ratio all that easily.