EASY INSTANT MESSAGING—AIM, Gchat, iChat, Facebook chat—makes doing The Rules so much harder. How can you make a guy wait to see you or even speak to you so he appreciates you when you’re literally available online for talking to? Instant messaging is like running into a guy in the hallway at school or on a street corner or at the water cooler at work and chatting for an hour. How hard to get are you when a guy can chat you up and know you are available that second? Don’t you have somewhere to go or something to do? Or can you pretend you do?
Even if you have nothing going on, you cannot let a guy know that by IMing him back in nanoseconds. As with any other form of communication, a guy should have to wait to hear from you. For a guy to stay intrigued, there has to be a little bit of a bungee jump for him. Don’t take that away by IMing him back right away and chatting for an hour or more!
We know that guys can be relentless when they like you and want to know everything about you. They like to catch you online and get in your face. They fire away questions as if you were on Jeopardy, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, or some other quiz show. It’s like a rapid-fire interrogation: “Hey, what’s up? How was your weekend?” Then, ten minutes later when you say you have to run: “Why do you have to get off now? Where are you going? What’s the rush? I thought your trainer was at 3 p.m. It’s only 2. What else is going on? I don’t see you on Gchat anymore. Are you blocking me? What’s going on? You’re so hard to reach…” Giving a guy online time doesn’t always lead to dates. Women are catching on to this poor excuse for a date: Lynnie, twenty-five, a software sales rep, told us she is tired of chatting with a guy online for an hour or more, feeling close, and then nothing coming of it. Sometimes you get lucky and the guy asks you out, but he also tries to monopolize your time with constant IMs, making it hard to follow the don’t-talk-to-him-24/7 Rule. But if you let him get too much too soon from you electronically, he might eventually get bored.
The problem is that we are all available all the time—but you can’t let him catch you online all the time! If you answer every chat, you will no longer be the mysterious, hard-to-get girl who is busy dating other guys, but instead the girl who is glued to her computer. But how can you avoid letting him know you’re available when in reality you are sitting at your desk or on your laptop in class all day or doing research online in the evening?
One way to do so is to make yourself appear “invisible.” That way, you won’t show up on his chat list—or on anyone else’s. If you see someone you want to chat with (like your mom or your BFF), you can initiate the IM without anyone bothering you. Another option is to set your status to “busy” or “unavailable.” This will show up on his chat list and it will discourage him from contacting you, or give you an automatic reason not to respond at all if he does. But don’t be too obvious by changing your status once he has already sent you an IM! In some forms of IM, you can also block a guy by going into your privacy settings. But be aware that he can ask someone else to check if you are online or even create another screen name and find out you are purposely hiding from him—use this method with caution!
If you know you are someone who can’t resist temptation, then you should just sign out of chat. Exit the program, or turn off Gchat or Facebook chat. You can be on these websites without everyone knowing it and without being so readily available. If he tries to chat when you are offline (or at least appear offline), the IM will turn into a message or e-mail, which you can just answer later according to The Rules timetable.
But if you don’t want to or can’t do one of the above, then you need to get out of there. You can learn how to end IM chats quickly—in ten minutes or less. When we tell women to do this, they are shocked. They argue that it’s rude and that they are way too nice to cut off a chat in ten minutes. What if the guy is in the middle of saying something important? We invariably find that such women are people-pleasers who also have a hard time getting off the phone with chatterbox friends or just saying no in general. We tell them “nice” is giving to charity or helping out at a shelter, but that it’s people-pleasing and being a doormat to stay on an IM chat for an hour—it’s better to get off abruptly than let a guy chat you up and not ask you out!
Here are some good conversation enders to prevent long IMs:
“I have to run!” Then log off before the guy has a chance to ask where you are going and what you are doing. It’s none of his business. If he wants to know all about you, let him e-mail or text or call you for a date. An IM chat is not a date!
“My Pilates class starts soon—have to go get ready.”
“So sorry, I have to hop on this call…”
“I’m meeting a friend for coffee… and I’m already late!”
“My internet is acting funny.”
“The program keeps signing me out!”
“My boss needs me…”
You get the idea! Say whatever you have to and just shut it down. Remember, you have a life—school, work, friends, hobbies, the gym, and hopefully dates—so you really don’t have more than ten minutes to chat. Set a timer if you have to. If a guy has so much to say and so much to ask you, he can do it on a date!