The Top 5 Restart Texts
The restart text is your text conversation’s defibrillator. It’s a provocative text designed to revive text conversations that have gone stale – your last-ditch effort at re-sparking the girl’s interest and intrigue in you. Crafting the right one will give your conversations another fighting chance.
Here are the top 5 templates for creating restart texts for your inactive text conversations:
1. The Callout. Call the girl out for not responding to your last text. A short, blunt insult will make her feel guilty for her faux pas. She’ll feel bad for being inconsistent with her kinder self-identity and will try to change your mind to resolve her inner-turmoil. Girls will also be more attracted to you for being a man who isn’t afraid to call them out.
Example 1:
Example 2:
2. The All Caps Reiterator. Ask your unanswered question again, but in all caps. This text is a playful slap on the wrist for not responding. It’s an indirect way of calling her out for her bad behavior without being harsh.
Example:
3. The Casual Convo Continuer. Continue the conversation’s most recent thread, as if the giant time delay never happened. Casually continuing the conversation shows you’re unphased by the conversation’s inactivity. It might make her believe that it was your decision all along to not continue the conversation earlier.
Example:
(10 days ago)
Her: “I love fast cars, what do u drive?”
You: “A mazda miata”
(Present)
You: “Ride it in the hills all the time. What u drive?”
4. The Wrong Number. Send a text that has no relation to the girl or any of your past interactions with her. She might respond to resolve her confusion about your text. Careful not to make the Wrong Number too elaborate or girls will know it’s contrived. And obviously her name is not in your list of ‘recent’ text conversations, so to make the wrong text plausible, write a message that sounds like it’s going to a recipient you rarely text.
Example:
(Present – 3 months since last text)
You: “Hey tell Kim I can give her a ride”
Her: “Who’s Kim?”
You: “Oops wrong num”
5. The Cliff Hanger. Pique her curiosity by alluding that you know something that would interest her. More socially calibrated girls might realize this is a ploy to get her to re-engage. But even then, they might entertain your Cliff Hanger out of curiosity.
Example:
(1 month ago)
Her: “I work downtown as a hairstylist”
You: “How’d u rate my hairdo?”
(Present)
You: “I found out hairstylist’s dirty secret”
Her: “What?”
You: “Worried I know?”
The best restart texts invoke emotions that compel girls to respond back. Like in the examples above, they should:
- Make her laugh
- feel guilty about ignoring you
- confuse her
- make her curious
Many guys make the mistake of sending restart texts that don’t provoke girls to respond back. They rely on vapid cliches like “How’s your Monday going?” or “Any fun plans tonight?” or “Happy Friday!” to stimulate lifeless conversations. Restart texts need to deliver a therapeutic shock with enough voltage to make girls re-engage in conversations that have previously flatlined their interest.
Since restart texts are designed to be emotive, they can do a lot of unnecessary damage if they’re delivered too early. A prematurely delivered restart text can make you come off as angry, desperate, needy, too eager, or even manipulative. This level of reactivity can kill off any remaining interest the girl had left for you.
You don’t have much to lose by attempting to restart ancient conversations, there’s no upper bound. But if you wait too long to restart, the girl may have already started a committed relationship, moved to a faraway location, or completely forgotten who you are. Restart texts are most effective anywhere between 7 days to 9 months of your inactive conversation’s last text.
Gradually figure out that she meets your high standard
Since having a high standard correlates with being a high-value guy, having a high standard is an attractive behavior. Let’s see how to apply that insight in your text game. But first, let’s understand how an average guy’s standard affects his dating behavior.
Imagine an average guy sitting on a park bench. Suddenly, a random ugly-looking girl walks by and he briefly makes eye contact with her. The guy has only watched this girl for a few seconds, so of course he hasn’t learned about most her qualities yet, such as:
- How she usually dresses
- Her personality
- Her interests
- Her values
- Her intelligence
- Her sense of humor
- What she’s looking for
- Whether she wants to have kids
- …etc
And yet by this point, he will have managed to form a ballpark estimate of her dating-worthiness, represented by the pink region in the graph below.
You can see that the pink region covers a lot of distance on the horizontal “Worthiness” axis. That’s because our average guy, after a brief glimpse of an ugly girl, still has a lot of uncertainty about how date-worthy she is. If he were to get to know her, and learn the answers to questions like the ones above, then his opinion of the girl’s date-worthiness would gradually increase in precision and certainty. The pink region in the graph would become narrower and taller.
But the pink region he has right now, as wide as it is, still fits entirely to the left of his “good enough” bar. Despite all his uncertainty about the ugly girl’s date-worthiness, our average guy has already concluded that she won’t be up to his standard. So average guys don’t care at all about ugly girls.
How about when a hot girl walks by our average guy on his park bench? Again, a brief glimpse is all it takes for our average guy to form a ballpark estimate of her date-worthiness.
This time, almost the entire pink area is to the right of his “good enough” bar. Our average guy thinks there’s about an 80% chance that this hot girl is good enough for him, so his subconscious mind is already saying “Yes” to her. He’d have to discover lots of negative qualities to change his verdict from “Yes” to “No”, which is possible but unlikely. So he’s already sold.
Hot girls don’t want a guy who’s immediately sold on them for any reason, especially not for their looks. If you treat a girl like you saw her as “good enough” from the moment you saw her, she’ll think you’re an average guy with an average standard. And their standard is higher than that.
But how should you act when you meet a hot girl?
Some people think you should treat a hot girl exactly like you’d treat an ugly girl, i.e. not care about her at all. That’s wrong. Because while most guys see zero chance that an ugly girl is up to their standard, even a high-value guy will see at least a small chance that a hot girl is up to his standard. In the graph below, the high-value guy is putting a modest amount of pink area to the right of his “good enough” bar.
The clock in the corner represents “right after meeting the girl”. At this point in time, not only is the high-value guy uncertain about the girl’s date-worthiness, he’s also uncertain which side of the “good enough” bar the girl will end up on.
Now let’s say the high-value guy spends more time with the girl, and discovers a number of qualities about her that are mostly positive – e.g. she’s funny and she has good self-control. Now his beliefs about her date-worthiness look like this:
At this point, our high-value guy thinks this hot girl is more than 50% likely to be worth dating. But don’t forget there’s still also a big chance that she’s not worth dating. A high-value guy would be feeling a growing interest level in this girl, but he’s definitely not sold on her yet.
Now if the trend continues – he keeps spending time with her, and he keeps discovering mostly-positive qualities about her – then his beliefs about her date-worthiness will eventually look like this:
A girl’s dream is to attract a high-value guy. And subconsciously, she longs for that attraction process to play out in a certain way. The last three graphs form a time-series visualization of how a budding attraction plays out in the mind of a typical high-value guy. If you want to be the guy of her dreams, study them well.
As promised, here’s how to apply these insights to your game. When you first meet a hot girl, let her see how uncertain you are about whether she’s good enough for you. Then, over time, you can discover her positive qualities and feel more confident that she meets your high standard. She’ll relish this process, and be turned on by it.
Your standard and the best you can do
How many times have you heard people say:
- “She’s not up to his standard”
- “She’s the best he can do”
As a guy, your standard determines whether a girl is worth your time and energy to be with, as opposed to being alone. But what determines your standard? Think about it for a moment.
The answer is that you subconsciously picture the best you can do, i.e. the highest-value girl you could ever hope to get. Then you adjust that bar down to a slightly lower-value girl that you could realistically get, and that’s your standard.
Notice how the graphs visualize this well-known truth about the dating market:
- High-value girls are less attainable,
- but every girl is more attainable to a high-value guy,
- so high-value guys have high standards.
The Personality Burka: Why Text Game is Necessary
As a guy on a dating site, how would you feel about receiving a message from a girl in a burka, out of the blue, about going on a date? Pay attention to your gut reaction about Claire, the girl above. It’s probably telling you:
- She can’t be that attractive
- You’ll probably waste your time if you meet her
- Her message is off-putting
- She doesn’t understand how dating works
Now remember what your gut reaction feels like, because it’s exactly how every girl feels when she gets a message from a typical guy.
A guy can’t hope to communicate more than a small glimpse of his personality on a dating site profile. In that sense, a dating site is a “personality burka”.
Let’s keep exploring your gut reaction to Claire. You’re skeptical. But take a moment to ask yourself: what would make you less skeptical and more attracted to Claire?
That’s right: a pic. Ideally, a pic that reveals a lot of information about what’s under Claire’s burka: what this scale calls a “good pic”:
Now consider this key fact about attraction:
- A girl’s looks are 80% of her attractiveness to you.
- Your looks are only 30% of your attractiveness to a girl.
A girl on a dating site is nothing like Claire: her body will be pretty exposed, and guys will be attracted to her. But a guy on a dating site is exactly like Claire: his personality will be covered in a burka, and girls will be skeptical about him.
So when you see a girl’s pic, you feel attraction. But when a girl sees your pic, she feels… skeptical. She doesn’t have enough information to feel attracted to you yet. It’s the same reason you don’t feel attracted to Claire yet.
As a guy, your most attractive quality is personality. That’s why this blog is all about how to have an attractive personality in your texts. But before you can master text game, you have to understand why it’s even necessary – why girls you meet online aren’t ready to “skip the games” and have coffee with you right away.
You’d like to take off your personality-burka, so that girls can feel attraction to you. But all you can do on a dating site is send text messages. How can text messages create attraction?
To understand how, ask yourself: What text message can Claire send you to make you think that she has an attractive body under her burka?
Here are some good answers:
- “I run every morning”
- “I’m so sore from the gym”
- “I’m a model”
Since attractive girls are more likely to be runners, more likely to go to the gym, and more likely to be models, each of the texts above would provide you a nonzero quantity of evidence that Claire is attractive.
Of course, it’s not that simple: Claire might be lying. E.g. while it’s undoubtedly true that attractive girls are more likely to run every morning, it’s possible that unattractive girls are just as likely – or even more likely – to claim they run every morning. Your gut should be able to confirm: it’s a real challenge for Claire to optimize her texts to provide you with the maximum amount of evidence that she’s attractive.
A girl in a burka needs text game to attract you. You, in your personality-burka, need text game to attract a girl. And that’s why text game is necessary.
Bob and Angie, Part 1
One TGFM reader submitted this text conversation for us to analyze – let’s call him “Bob”. Bob met Angie at a bar where he got her number. This text conversation started a few hours following the number close. Bob does some things right and some things wrong, let’s take a look.
Bob initiates the conversation with “Angie!”, the girl’s name. Bob correctly messages her the same night of the number close. You should text her a few hours following a number close in order to get your number in her phone while her memory of you is still fresh and emotional.
Bob shouldn’t have appended a “!” to her name – exclamation points always make your texts sound less powerful. Bob could’ve also done better than to write her name. He could’ve made a small reference to something they talked about so she’d remember him better. For instance, he could’ve texted something related to the dog story or just his name “Bob”.
In Bob’s next line, he starts by answering her question with his name. Bob was right to give his name out, but he should’ve acknowledged her slight faux pas for forgetting his name. He should’ve also shown reluctance to give out his name because he remembered hers and she didn’t his, which is evidence he’s lower status. Texting “Goldfish memory? It’s Bob” would’ve done the job.
In the second half of Bob’s text, he wrote “remember I told you about my dog?”. It’s good Bob is bringing up a topic they’ve discussed before, but his execution could’ve improved. He could’ve sounded less reactive by atomizing his text to something like “remember dog story?”.
How to Manage Your Reactivity
Girls lust after higher status men. And by contriving to act with the right amount of reactivity, you can manipulate your status higher than hers. To achieve the right status level in your text conversations, your reactivity level should, on average, be consistently lower than hers, but not too low — there’s a sweet spot. Hit the sweet spot by follow these rules to help you maintain the baseline:
- Have smaller text blocks
- Be the one that starts and kills conversational threads
- Make longer time delays
- Use fewer emojis
- Use fewer “lol”s and“ha”s
- Write more succinctly
- Smaller responses to questions
- User more abbreviations
- Reinitiate less
Follow these rules as long as she responding with good or neutral behavior. One of the biggest mistakes amateur texters make is getting too reactive from good behavior. Don’t be the guy who gets uncontrollably excited after receiving his first long text from a hot girl and start authoring a text novella topped off with a yellowish blob of emojizz. Your single high reactivity text can undo the the status you’ve established in the 10 cool texts preceding it.
The right response to a girl’s larger text blocks and shorter time delays is a slight reactivity adjustment in the same direction. As her reactivity level goes up and down, so does yours, but lower on average.
Number Close Using Emojis Only
This continued for a while…
Laci Green is Clueless About Men
In response to this Laci Green video.
Laci claims men and the media overly sexualize women, causing them to have lower self-esteem and psychological disorders. She then makes the assumption that women and society don’t judge men as harshly and that the “cultural narrative looks at men as *whole* people”. Actually, women are equally as shallow as men, it’s just harder to see why:
Another reason men are more easily and rapaciously slapped with the “shallow” label is because their sexual preferences are more visually discernible; female prettiness and sexiness, which is what men desire above all, are readily observable. Such is not the case (at least not to the same degree) of women’s sexual preferences; female preferences are focused more on men’s status, dominance and charm, and thus less easily distinguishable at a glance. The non-visual, time-delayed nature of much of women’s animal desires allows them to plausibly evade the smear of shallowness.
Men struggle with society’s expectations of them just as much as women do, but they’re less likely to publicize it. Men are socialized not to complain about not living up to the standards of what society deems is an attractive “Man”. It may seem like men aren’t being “objectified”, but they are being superficially scrutinized, and it’s more damaging because they’re conditioned not to voice their insecurities or seek help. This post points to a study that shows to what extent men hide unmanly information about themselves:
Only 16% of men with documented case histories of child sexual abuse disclosed that abuse on a survey intended to capture child sexual abuse. Sixteen percent of men compared to sixty-four percent of women. That amounts to a disclosure rate of child sexual abuse four times higher in women than in men.
Here’s a good video about how society perssures boys to live up to masculine ideals and how it forces them to hide their issues and put on a “mask”. Masculine ideals aren’t all social constructs, they have a natural basis. But society isn’t doing a good job of helping those who suffer from coming short of being a Man.
Laci can argue that women suffer from society’s expectations and provide suggestions on how we can improve the situation. But she needs to stop talking about men not experiencing the same struggle.
The Average Guy Opener (AGO) You Should Never Do
Example of a typical AGO from online dating sites:
From: Chillguysteve
To: SoccerGuurl87Hi SoccerGuurl87, my name is Steve.
How’s your weekend going so far? I saw your profile and thought I would message you. You seem interesting and we have a lot in common. I love hiking, biking, beaches, music and movies. What are your hobbies? I’m really driven by my career and always love trying new things! I just moved to the city for a new job as a senior account manager for an internet company. I hope my message and profile catch your attention enough to hear back from you.
Have a great Monday :–)
– Steve
Girls will read your message like detectives. They’re looking for clues beyond your message’s literal interpretation so they can figure out who you really are. The #1 thing they’re detectives about is how interested you are because girls are attracted to hard-to-get men.
If you make her believe you’re very interested in her, you’ll be easy-to-get. If you show very little interest, you’ll be impossible-to-get. Your goal is to communicate the right level of interest that makes you hard-to-get.
Most guys fail to be hard-to-get by looking too interested. Steve’s AGO is great example of how the average guy fails to be hard-to-get by littering their messages with clues of interest. Here’s a breakdown and analysis of Steve’s AGO:
Username
Chillguysteve
Your message makes its first appearance in the girl’s inbox. And the first thing she’ll read is probably your emboldened username. This is your first impression, which makes it a big deal. The girl will heavily weigh any clues about your interest level that she gathers from your username.
In the example above, Steve designates “Chillguysteve” as his first impression. Think about what would motivate Steve to choose a name like Chillguysteve? Why can we safely assume Steve doesn’t use “Chillguysteve” as his handle on any other non-dating site?
Steve saw his username as an opportunity to explicitly pitch himself as a “chill guy” (mind you, dating sites already have a designated area for pitching oneself). Unfortunately, “Chillguysteve” is weak evidence that Steve is “chill” – a word too vague to be good evidence of any specific attractive trait anyway.
With no hint of irony, sarcasm, or humor (i.e. personality) in his username, girls will subconsciously think Steve doesn’t think the normal character he plays in life imputes attractive traits. Girls intuitively know that a hard-to-get guy wouldn’t bother explicitly pitching his value. “Chillguysteve” communicates that Steve is normally easy-to-get with his love interests.
Greeting
Hi SoccerGuurl87
The “Hi” is passable, but there’s no value in repeating her lame username “SoccerGuurl87”. In person, repeating her name may show you remembered it, or that you recognize her, or that you’re addressing her and not someone close by. But online, both her and your username unambiguously loom over the conversation, readily available for either of you to reference. As a general rule, putting in effort to produce low-information messages reveals your interest and mediocre social skills.
The AGO finishes off the greeting by proclaiming “my name is Steve”. At this stage in the interaction, there’s no need for the girl to know your real name. The girl will assume your high interest level caused you to disclose irrelevant information about yourself.
Small Talk Question
How’s your weekend going so far?
Steve segues from the greeting to a safe, small-talk-esque question. Other examples include:
- “How are you today?”
- “How is your evening?”
- “Did you have a good day?”
- “How are you?”
- “Anything fun planned for the weekend?
Caring about her answer to these questions shows too much interest. Girl’s know that a hard-to-get guy wouldn’t bother learning about their plans or well-being – he’s not interested enough to care.
These questions are also cliche. They’re overused and have lost most of their meaning. Using cliches offers no clues that an interesting character is behind the keyboard. Up until this point in your message, any person or robot could’ve generated the same thing.
Explicit Explanation
I saw your profile and thought I would message you. You seem interesting and we have a lot in common.
Steve designed the next line to explicitly explain why he’s messaging the girl. Hard-to-get guys know they’re communicating enough interest by the fact that they’re messaging her. Any more explanation beyond that is redundant and signals too much interest.
Explicitly explaining your intention also makes you reek of insecurity. It shows you feel you need to justify your actions or that you’re worried she won’t understand why you messaged her. You’ll lose your hard-to-get perception the moment she gets a whiff of your insecurity.
More examples of AGO’s Explicit Explanation lines:
- “I saw your profile and thought I would message you.”
- “It seems like we complement each other very well and are looking for similar things in a significant other.”
- “It is hard to find quality people on here and you seem like you have your act together, so I thought I would give it a shot.”
- “You seem fun and really cute.”
- “You sound smart, sweet, sincere, and you’re so pretty!
- “You seem like such a genuine nice person.”
- “I think you’re super cute and you seem like you might be cool.”
- “I just read and really enjoyed your profile and very interested Also you are looking amazing and very beautiful.”
It’s actually good to express why you’re interested in a girl, but you should do it using subtext.
Example 1:
Explicit — “I saw you’re from the same small town as I am and thought I would message you”
Subtexted — “Whoa, you’re the first I’ve seen also from [name of town]”
In the subtext version, the will infer that being from the same small town is part of why you messaged her. She doesn’t need to be spoon-fed the obvious.
Example 2:
She wrote in her profile that she loves to cook and finds it attractive when guys fix things with their hands. In your profile, you write that you’re a huge foodie.
Explicit — “It seems like we complement each other very well and are looking for similar things in a significant other.”
Subtexted — “I can fix cars and you can cook, I think we’re meant to be”
Self-summary
I love hiking, biking, beaches, music and movies. What are your hobbies? I’m really driven by my career and always love trying new things! I just moved to the city for a new job as a senior account manager for an internet company.
In the next few lines, Steve writes a self-summary that should’ve been in its designated area on his profile page. If this information is already accessible from your profile, you’re basically telling the girl you don’t think she’ll visit and read your page.
Normally, a hard-to-get guy would just assume the girl would read his profile. Or he’d be too indifferent to care whether she read it or not. That’s why shoving your self-summary in your message is a good sign you’re not a hard-to-get guy.
Closing Statement
I hope my message and profile catch your attention enough to hear back from you.
The closing statement is designed to explicitly communicate the next steps. Steve’s closing statement, wordy and tucked underneath a mound of words, comes off as a meager and apologetic attempt at escalating the relationship. Other examples of AGO closing statements:
- “Looking forward to hear from you”
- “Please check out my profile and let me know if you like what you see :-)”
- “By any chance would you like to grab some coffee some time?”
These closing statements give girls many clues that you don’t feel you deserve your request to be fulfilled. The girl interprets the mound of cliches and redundant info above the closing statement as a try-hard attempt to justify your request. She knows you don’t derive intrinsic value from writing the BS word cloud above. She knows exactly why you wrote it and that reason is explicitly defined in the closing statement. Your revealed intentions render the rest of your message’s content as an embarrassingly effortful and indirect ploy to fulfill a single goal. This signals your insecurity and feelings of unworthiness.
The closing statement doesn’t make you easy-to-get, it makes you already-gotten. The girl doesn’t have to work at all to win you over, you’ve already pre-approved her. Girls who will fulfill the closing statement’s request will probably be at the bottom 15% of girls in your league.
Salutations
Have a great Monday :–)
Like the greeting, this is another low-information cliche that doesn’t offer any value or say anything interesting about your character. A salutation is even worse than a greeting because even some unattractive guys know it’s inappropriate in an online dating message.
Signature
– Steve
Like the greeting and salutation, signatures show you’re too interested because it’s redundant and useless information. But signatures do double the damage. They’re a good sign you’re clueless about messaging girls you’re gaming. It also signals you may not be familiar with informal text communication in general. Do you even have friends?
Why hard-to-get is attractive
For intuition on woman’s attraction heuristic, read the following thought experiment:
Imagine you’re about to choose one of three job interviews to attend. You know nothing about the job prior to the interview. You could be applying as a cashier at McDonald’s or a CEO of Intel—you have no idea. The only information you’re given is the following:
Job Interview 1 – You answer all the questions easily and feel confident you’ll get the job.
Job Interview 2 – You barely manage to answer the questions and you feel your chances of getting hired are insignificant.
Job Interview 3 – You manage to answer most, but not all of the questions and feel there is about a 50% chance of being hired. Remember, you know nothing about the salary, benefits or prestige of the job you’re interviewing for.
Given what you know, which job interview would you choose and why?
Most people would easily discard the second option. After all, there is no point of wasting your opportunity to interview for attainable jobs for one you have no shot at. The difficulty of the interview is evidence you’re probably under-qualified anyways.
Now you’re left with the first and third option. This decision is a little less obvious. Most would discard the first option, but not for the same reason they discarded the second. The problem with the first interview is that it’s too easy. There are certain inferences you can make about a job whose interview process is easy for you to pass: you’re probably overqualified and can get a higher-paying and more prestigious job elsewhere.
This raises the question: For a job you believe you’re perfectly qualified for and can’t do better or worse elsewhere, how would you expect the job interview to go?
You would expect it to be challenging, but still perceived attainable. In other words, the interview has to be the hardest possible interview that doesn’t make you feel hopeless. And this is why you choose the third interview—it fits the bill.
We know we’re maximizing our payoff when we experience these kinds of challenges; in this case, it was about maximizing the amount of money and prestige from our job. We are evolutionarily designed to seek out these sorts of challenges because they indicate that we’re maximizing our potential gains. Activates that are too hard use up too much energy and time for a little payoff. Conversely, activities that are too easy are a waste because time can be spent on yielding a higher payoffs elsewhere. Think about the times you’ve most enjoyed a sport or game. I can guarantee that in almost every case you experienced a perfect blend of ease and difficulty.
Women are like job-seekers going from interview to interview without knowing the salary or prestige of the jobs. Instead of seeking jobs, they’re seeking men; and instead of trying to maximize salary, they’re trying to maximize status in men. Women are turned on by men who bring forth a “challenging interview process.”
A man’s attractiveness (his status) is not as apparent as a woman’s: her physical appearance. While women have to “discover” a man’s value, men can plainly see a woman’s value. So men know how challenging a woman will be based on her physical appearance, woman don’t. Instead, they use the challenge itself to determine attractiveness. The same reasons that make a sexy woman challenging, make a challenging man sexy – because they’re probably the best you can do.
Don’t be easy to get. Don’t be impossible to get. Be hard to get.
Text Game For Men 
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