I've been texting a girl I met recently and we're supposed to go out next week. Things are going well and she's giving me plenty of IOIs. The only problem is that she's extremely negative a lot of the time. Not towards me, just bitching about life in general and the annoying little things that happen to her. "My car broke down AGAIN..." "My sister's such a bitch..." "I hate my computer but I can't afford a new one...." 50% of the time conversations are light, fun, and flirty. The other 50% she's telling me some sad story or another about how hard life is.

I feel like I can usually run a pretty good game, but I'm not quite sure how to best handle this situation. My first urge is to sympathize with her, offer support and encouragement, but I feel like this might be the wrong thing to do.

What I've been doing so far is just ignoring the text and dropping the conversation when she goes negative and then texting her again a while later with something funny, upbeat, and completely unrelated. Seems to be working ok so far but I don't want to come across as a completely uncaring asshole who never even acknowledges the problems she's telling me about.

Any thoughts?