A letter that gets no reply feels personal, and at fifty or sixty, with a divorce or a bereavement behind you, it can feel like more than it is. The plain facts are that silence on a letter site is common, that most of its causes have nothing to do with you, and that there is one sensible thing to do about it, which is to write once more and then move on. This article is about doing that well.
Why she may not have replied
Before deciding what to write, it helps to see the ordinary reasons in a row.
- Time. Kyiv is seven hours ahead of New York. Your Tuesday evening letter arrives in her small hours; she reads it Wednesday; if she answers in her evening it lands during your Wednesday lunch. A "day" of silence is often half a day.
- Her own schedule. Most members read and answer letters when work and family let them, not on the hour. Replies can come in batches.
- Power and internet. Outages are part of life in Ukraine. A quiet week may be a dark one.
- Volume. A woman with a good profile receives more letters than she can answer. Yours may be in the pile, not in the bin.
- Politeness. Some people find it easier not to answer than to write "no, thank you". Silence from a stranger after one letter is often exactly that, and it is not rude by her lights.
- Life. A child's illness, a relative's news, a bad week. Things that stop letters for a fortnight and then start them again.
None of these can be told apart from the outside, which is why the answer is the same for all of them: one more letter, then patience, then a decision.
How long should you wait before following up?
After a first letter, about a week. After a correspondence that had been going for a while, ten days or so. Shorter than that and you are inside the ordinary delays listed above; longer and the follow-up has to explain itself. Do not count hours. Letters are not texts, and treating them like texts is what makes waiting painful.
What to write in a follow-up letter
A good follow-up has three properties: it is short, it contains something new, and it does not ask why. "Did you get my letter?" puts her on the spot; "I hope everything is all right" reads as anxiety dressed as concern. Instead, write as though the pause were nothing, because it may be.
After a first letter got no reply: "Hello Nataliya. I wrote to you last week about the photograph on the pier; since then I have found out that the town in it has a jazz festival in September, which explains a great deal. If you would like to write, I would like to read it. If not, I wish you a good autumn. Mark."
After a conversation went quiet: "Dear Svitlana, I had a quiet week here and it made me realise how much I had got used to your letters on a Wednesday. No need to explain the silence; life does that. I went to my daughter's for Sunday lunch and her roast has now overtaken mine, which I am taking badly. What has your week been? David."
Both give her a reason to answer that is not guilt. Both make it easy to pick up where you left off. And both make it easy to say nothing, which is the point: a follow-up should be a door, not a hand on the arm.
If she goes quiet after several good letters
This is harder than silence after a first letter, because you had something. Send the follow-up above, wait, and if nothing comes after two weeks, send nothing more. Then do two things. First, look honestly at your last letter: did it contain a plan, a declaration, a question about relocation, a request for her phone number, a joke about the war? Any of those can end a correspondence quietly, and knowing it helps with the next one. Second, keep the letters; she may write again in a month with an explanation, and if she does, take her at her word and carry on without reproach.
If she goes quiet after a video call
Write the same day, as you should after any call, with one thing you enjoyed and no question about the silence. If nothing comes for two weeks, the call told her something, and it is kinder to both of you to accept that. It is not a verdict on you; it is one person's answer to one afternoon. The first video date article is worth re-reading before the next call, if only to rule out the avoidable things.
When not to follow up at all
- When your first letter was a greeting on its own. Write a proper first letter instead; the follow-up is the letter you should have sent.
- When you have already followed up once. A second follow-up is not persistence; it is a third unanswered letter and she will read it as pressure.
- When she answered a question with silence that was, on reflection, a no. "Would you move to Ohio?" in the fourth letter, met with quiet, has been answered.
- When the last thing you sent was angry. An apology is a different letter and can be sent; a follow-up cannot.
What not to do
- Do not send three letters in a week. Each one costs credits and lowers the chance of a reply to any of them.
- Do not write to ask what you did wrong. You almost certainly did nothing, and the question is unanswerable from her side.
- Do not ask another member about her. Her silence is hers to keep.
- Do not open with reproach if she writes back. "I thought you had forgotten me" is a bad first line for a second chance.
- Do not read silence as a scam. Silence is the opposite of the pattern to worry about. The pattern in the safety guide is a person who writes more, faster and warmer than the correspondence has earned, and then needs something. A woman who has gone quiet is not that; she is simply not writing. The one rule that matters in either case is the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's: never send money or gifts to someone you have not met in person (FTC). Money never changes hands between members on this site, so a request for it is always a request to go around the site.
How to make the next first letter more likely to get a reply
Silence after a first letter is usually about the letter, not about you, and the letter can be fixed. Pick one detail from her profile, write one honest paragraph about yourself, ask one easy question, sign your name. Six sentences. The first message article gives worked examples and the conversation starters article shows how to build questions from a profile rather than from a list.
What to do next
Send the one follow-up if it is due, and then, the same evening, write a first letter to someone else. Not as revenge and not as a numbers game: because the correspondence that goes somewhere is usually the second or third one started, not the first, and because writing to someone new is the surest cure for staring at an empty mailbox. The members gallery is open without an account, and reading a few profiles slowly will remind you why you began.