Why Do Women Disappear When You’re Emailing Them?

Dear Evan,

What’s the deal with engaging in e-mail conversation with women, things are going fine, and then out of nowhere, for no reason, they fall off the face of the earth? I really don’t get that and think that women do it much more than men. Thoughts?

Matt

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Tons of thoughts, Matt. First, a related story:

I have a client who is a super-busy career woman in her early 40’s who has a thousand things on her plate. Still, she manages to squeeze in a little online dating and coaching because falling in love is important to her. One day, she announces that she’s fed up with Match.com. Specifically, there’s this one man who seemed interested in her. He told her he was going to call her, but didn’t. He later emailed to apologize – he got busy at work. This wasn’t a sufficient explanation to my client. A thoughtful man would have found a way to make it happen. Then I pointed out to my client that she was a very busy person herself. And that she has had to cancel appointments with me because of her super-packed schedule. And in that moment, it hit her like a ton of bricks, that despite her intelligence, kindness, and self-awareness, she was a complete and utter hypocrite.

I’m not mocking her at all. We’re all hypocrites in that we expect people to treat us better than we treat them. Then we go around squawking about how poorly everybody else in the world treats us. We all hope to be forgiven for our minor indiscretions (“I’m busy”, “I’m late”, “I forgot”), but we don’t want to do much forgiving ourselves. Especially not to total strangers.

Matt’s email has inspired me to write a longer piece on this for Match.com, but here are a few of the perfectly reasonable reasons that a woman (or a man) might not write back to you.

She’s busy
She’s just not that into you
She no longer has a subscription
She’s seeing a bunch of other people
She got serious with someone else
She’s out of town on business/vacation
She’s got personal issues – health, family, etc.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter why a person disappears. If you didn’t do anything wrong in your email exchange to drive her away, there’s nothing to learn from the situation. Just accept the fact that you’ll never know what’s going on in a stranger’s head and move along.

And the next time you choose to stop writing to someone, ask yourself if you owe them an explanation. I’m guessing that you don’t.

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Your thoughts?