Someone suggested an excellent trick here a few days ago - changing his name in your phone to a nickname such as “a guy from the party” or “real estate consultant”. This keeps you emotionally detached from him and allows you to asses the situation more objectively. You can even write something like “Loser” for those who’ve proven themselves LVM and don’t deserve your attention.

I want to offer a few more tips to avoid texting him first. The radical one is - delete his number! It especially works if you’re not connected to him on any other social media except WhatsApp. You will simply be unable to text him unless he gets in touch with you himself!

Another trick is archiving/deleting your chats. It’s way easier to resist the temptation to text him if you don’t see your conversation every time you open the app. It will also be psychologically more difficult to have to unarchive your conversation to write him, or if it’s deleted, to dig his number out and write the first message. On WhatsApp, once he writes you, the chat is automatically unarchived and you receive a notification.

The most important trick is of course, to live your life so that you are simply too busy to reply to his messages straight away or to think whether to write him first!

These tricks have been helping me a lot, I hope they can help someone else, too!