OLD: your advice on when to move from chat to date or end a chat which is going nowhere.

[Liltzero]

Just that really. 7 years after divorce I'm dipping my toes into the world online dating and have joined Bumble. I have a couple of chats on the go. How do you move from chat to a meet or end the chat because it is going nowhere? Thank you wise ones.

My personal rule was arrange a date within 2 weeks or move on. Lots of OLD men say things like "It would be great to meet" or "I would love to take you on a date!" But then get all vague about actual arrangements, watch out for that and move on if they start games over setting the date.
I always let the man ask for the date then worked together to arrange somewhere suitable.

Thank you. And if you felt the chat was going nowhere, what was / is your approach for ending the chat?

I would be quite business-like about this endeavour: arrange a coffee or whatever after a couple of promising conversations. If they don't seem keen, move along to the next one.

If it's true that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince, you might as well get on with it. Look at it as a practical exercise.

Re ending the chat, I'd just say that I was on the site to date, and if he doesn't take the same attitude, just wish him luck and then block. NEXT!

If i felt the chat was going nowhere (Which is 95% of them, you develop a keen nose for which ones are going to work out after a while) i just stop replying. You owe people nothing, thats the nature of OLD.

It doesnt count as 'ghosting' unless youre actually together, so dont worry about that.
Men will do the same to you too, just dont take it to heart.

And BLOCK as other PP said, its easy on most sites to block people from contacting you.

Look, I know you could simply just stop replying, and block, but Where's the harm in being polite and considerate, and simply sending a short message to say something like "it's been nice chatting to you / getting to know you, but I don't think this is going anywhere, so I'll sign off now. Good luck with finding the right one... Litlzero". Then by all means, block.

Yes, Smidge, I'd do it like that. I didn't mean to imply that all social graces should be sacrificed .

If we’ve been chatting for a bit, and date “hints” have gone nowhere, I like to send a simple final message: “This isn’t working for me. Good luck” and then block. Life is too short for endless penpalling.

Met my DH online so it's been a fair while since I had the joy of navigating OLD but personally I always tried to meet those I was interested in within a week of starting to chat. It's way too easy to start painting an often idealistic view of someone and end up overinvested if you chat online for weeks on end so I'd try to get the initial face to face meeting out the way fairly quickly so I could either confirm it had potential or move on.

As for ending chats, more often than not the conversation would naturally peter out so I rarely felt the need to formally end a chat, unless they were downright inappropriate/rude in which case I simply blocked them. Most people will have multiple irons in the fire at once so are unlikely to be too surprised if a chat goes cold. That said, when I met now DH I did message the few guys I'd also been regularly chatting with to say I'd since met someone and would be deleting my profile so as not to totally ghost, but I only did that for the few I would have met in person had it not been for meeting DH.

Thank you so much ladies. It's taken me 7 years to get to this stage of actually contemplating dating again so I appreciate the hand holding!