In the Dating World, Crafting the Perfect Message Is Its Own Art Form

Shortly after Abby Norton met someone she liked on Hinge last July, the 24-year-old editor went on a two-week trip abroad. Given the different time zones, she and her potential suitor struggled to establish a texting routine while she was away, although on average there were a few texts per day.

Once Ms. Norton returned to Minneapolis, where she lives, the two hung out in person, but the texting still felt unsatisfying, remaining at “a couple of times a day, despite being back in the same time zone.”

This left Ms. Norton with a lot of anxiety. “It came to a boiling point one night when I found myself crying” after not hearing from him for “a day or two” — mainly, she said, because “it occurred to me that I probably had internal issues to work through that had brought me to this point of insecurity and anxiety.”

So she decided to enlist the help of a professional in the newly emerging field of text-specific dating courses. She took a class called Texting Communication Cure Crash Course offered by licensed therapist and dating coach Kelsey Wonderlin, who is based in Nashville.

Ms. Wonderlin, who had been offering dating courses since fall 2021 but began catering specifically to texting issues starting in September, is one of the multiple dating coaches attempting to provide clients with the written communication skills necessary to take matches offline and into the real world — and then keep them going. Among the questions they attempt to help their clients answer: What’s a great first message to send on a dating app? How do you flirt in a way that’s not too creepy? What if they simply don’t respond?

With almost 180,000 Instagram followers, Blaine Anderson, a dating coach in Austin, Texas, has always found that her videos about texting have been a hit with her mostly male audience. This, in addition to her personal experiences receiving weird or too many messages on dating apps, inspired her to launch a course called Texting Operating System in August, “to eliminate guys’ stress and anxiety from communicating with women via messages or text,” Ms. Anderson, 33, said.