You match on a Tuesday. By Friday you have traded a few hundred messages and know the name of a childhood dog. By the Thursday after that, the thread has gone quiet and neither of you can say exactly when it happened. How long you should talk before meeting is a question of timing, and timing is less forgiving than it looks.
Part one The window and why it closes
Every match opens a window. It stays open while curiosity is doing the work, while you still want to know what this person's face does when they laugh, and it closes on its own, usually inside a week or two. Nothing dramatic marks the closing. The messages keep arriving. They simply stop meaning anything.
Waiting rarely helps, because chat is not a slow reveal of a person. It is a construction project. Every reply gets filed into an image you are assembling, and you fill the gaps yourself, using your own timing and your own humor. The person on the other end is doing the same with you. Meet after two weeks of that and a real human being has to walk into a room and compete with a character you spent your evenings writing. It is a strange thing to do to someone you like.
Text also flatters unevenly. Someone who writes beautifully at midnight can go quiet in a bright room, and someone who sends short, flat replies can be the funniest person at the table. Judge from writing alone for long enough and you will be wrong in both directions, and sure of it.
Then there is momentum, which is not romantic but decides more than romance does. You both have jobs, friends, a week that fills itself. Plans get floated and moved. Somewhere in there the conversation settles into a correspondence neither of you asked for, pleasant and going nowhere. Nobody ends it. It just stops.
So the honest answer is days, not weeks. Long enough that you want the meeting and feel safe about it. Short enough that you are meeting a person instead of a character you invented.
The longer you talk, the more you meet your own invention.
Part two How to use the window well
A few days of messages will tell you most of what a message can tell you: whether they can hold a conversation, whether they stay kind when you disagree with them, whether they want the same sort of thing you want. The rest cannot be typed. So the useful skill is knowing how to move.
- Move off text early, because a short phone call does in ten minutes what a week of typing cannot. You get a voice, its speed, its warmth, the pause before an answer.
- Treat a video call as the honest middle step, since a few minutes with cameras on is a fair look at a real face and a reasonable thing to ask of a stranger. Anyone worth meeting will understand why you asked.
- Suggest something small and public, coffee in the afternoon, a walk somewhere with other people around, a bar with the lights on. Small keeps expectations honest, and public is how sensible adults meet someone new.
- Keep the first meeting short, an hour, with somewhere to be afterward. Neither of you owes the other an evening or a verdict, and a meeting that is going well always finds a way to extend itself.
- Tell a friend and arrange your own way there and back, giving the name, the place and the hour to someone who will notice. Your own transport means that nothing about your night depends on another person's plans holding.
Ask plainly when you ask. A named day, a named place, a small stretch of time. Vagueness reads as reluctance even when it is only politeness, and a plan that has to be negotiated across many messages tends to die during the negotiation. If the day does not work for them, offer another one straight away. Two attempts is generous. Three is a hint you are choosing not to take.
All of that is the ordinary shape of a good first meeting: short, public, easy to leave, easy to extend. It costs the other person nothing, and anyone who makes a fuss about it is telling you something useful, early, for free.
The point of talking is to get to the meeting. The point of the meeting is to find out how you differ in person, which is the one thing a thread will never show you, because a thread is where both of you sound reasonable. You want to know how they hold a silence you would have filled, whether their steadiness settles you or bores you, whether the way they order coffee makes you laugh. Our matching looks for the person who completes you rather than the person who copies you, and that is not a claim anyone can verify by text. Go and see. Days, not weeks.