So you like someone but they’re really bad at texting. Or they ONLY want to text and you can’t get them to have a real conversation when you’re apart. Is there anything you can do to move things forward?

In today’s video, I do something a little different. I break down a TikTok video where a woman gets increasingly frustrated with the “bare minimum” guy she’s dating as she reads through their texts. Then I share some different responses she could send to show more of her standards . . . to finally get out of texting limbo. Be sure to let me know your thoughts once you watch it!

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Matthew Hussey: 

Have you experienced someone who gives you so little effort in text messages that you wonder why on earth you are continuing to engage with them, and yet you can’t help but feel this irresistible urge to keep going with them? This is the bare minimum texting, and I want to talk about how you can get out of it today. What does it look like to show up in a way that is actually going to make someone put in more effort? 

Now, I went through a little scroll through TikTok, and I found this video of a woman breaking down with her friends a text exchange that she had with a guy who’s driving her crazy. 

All right. Well, watch it together.

Speaker 1:

So today was giving bare f****** minimum,

“Good morning.” 

“Good morning.” 

I didn’t reply with an emoji, because, like, why would I? 

Speaker 2:

Yeah

Speaker 3:

Why? 

Speaker 1:

“How are we feeling?”

I called him. He doesn’t pick up. I say, “Call me.” He goes, “Hold up baby girl, talking to my man. He’s telling me something.” I’m like, “Okay.” Very dry. 11:58. 

He responds 1:38: “Was a long combo.” 

I didn’t want to respond.

Speaker 2:

Still doesn’t call you back, 

Speaker 1: 

Still doesn’t call me back. So then I said, “Call me.” And then like “You never called me back. It’s so annoying.”  2:44. 

Responds at 8:20, “Nice. What are you doing?” 

What am I doing right now?

Speaker 2: 

Nothing. You’re not responding. 

Speaker 1:

No?

Speaker 2:

It’s done. 

Speaker 1: 

No, let’s respond. 

Matthew Hussey: 

I love the moment at the end where she’s just so forlorn that her friend thinks she shouldn’t send a message back at all. 

I really feel like this video just epitomizes this internal schism we feel where one part of us wants to rage about someone and complain about them and talk about how awful they are, and the other part of us desperately wants to text them and talk about our feelings with them. 

This is a very, very common scenario of—I mean, firstly, have you ever done this? Have you ever sat around with your friends and decoded text messages? I think that’s a very common thing as well, isn’t it? You get a text message, you wonder what it means, what you should say back. You have a tribunal with your friends to try and figure it out. This person wouldn’t even be having this conversation with her friends if he was putting in an amount of effort that was enjoyable to her. It would be a very different conversation, at least. But he’s giving so little. You may remember this kind of guy from one of my previous videos. 

YouTube Video:

This is the man who comes in strong, shows lots of interest, and then disappears. Except he doesn’t quite disappear. He still pops up now and again with an intermittent text at random intervals to make sure that you cannot forget him. 

Matthew Hussey:

The MPI guy is the person who puts in the minimum possible investment to keep your attention while giving as little as they can get away with. So let’s talk about this. I want to break this down step by step because I always find practical examples to be the thing that’s most educational. 

I want to take this woman’s text exchange and look at where she might have done something different than she did.

Speaker 1: 

So today was giving bare f****** minimum.

Matthew Hussey:

She’s really likable, this woman, isn’t she? 

Speaker 1: 

“Good morning.” 

“Good morning.” 

I didn’t reply with an emoji. Because why would I?

Matthew Hussey:

All right, I want to stop there for a moment. The idea of “I didn’t want to reply with an emoji, because why would I?” He has sent, I can’t tell what emoji he has put in his message, but he sent a good morning with an emoji. She, in a sense, is falling into a common trap of, even in response to his dry text, what she sends is a one-word response. 

So again, in that response, there’s like a degree of protectionism, like, I don’t want to show too much, I don’t want to show that I really care. And the challenge of that is, when we’re protecting ourselves by being aloof, we aren’t demanding the things we really want from someone. We’re not communicating our needs. We’re not communicating a standard. In a way we’re actually dropping to the level of their standard, right? We’re giving them permission to keep talking to us like this, because that’s how we’re talking to them, while never voicing our needs about how we want them to talk to us. And we’re not modeling the kind of communication or behavior that we would like to see from them. And that word is really important, modeling, because somewhere along the way, we have to model the kind of energy we want to see from somebody else to see if they can rise to meet us there. 

There was a great thing Shakespeare said of Falstaff: “He said he wasn’t just a wit, but a cause of wit. In others.” Very, very interesting line, “Not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.” Now think about that. That’s leadership, that we can be something, but by being it, be a cause of it in someone else. By being flirtatious, we can elicit a more flirtatious energy from someone else. By being human, we might be able to cause more humanity in another person. By being authentic, we can cause more authenticity in another person, but that requires leadership. It means not waiting around for someone to be something first, but to model it and to see if they can meet us there. 

So I said I liked when she called him, right? I thought that was proactive. It was bold, it was confident. But when he didn’t pick up, she then sent a message saying, “Call me,” and that then to me, almost veers into the kind of communication that she doesn’t want from him. Sort of terse, lacking in any warmth. So what could she have said instead? She could have said, “Hey, I just tried you and couldn’t get through. Give me a call when you have a moment.” This is modeling the kind of mature communication that she wants to receive from him. 

And by the way, everything I’m doing right now is just warm up, because the main message that is going to make the difference is the one that’s going to come at the end. Let’s keep going with this video for now.

Speaker 1:

He responds 1:38, “It was a long combo.”

Matthew Hussey:

I totally get her annoyance because he’s annoying me as I’m listening to it. Maybe he’s annoying you too. 

Speaker 1:

I didn’t want to respond.

Speaker 2:    

Still didn’t call you back. 

Speaker 1:

Still doesn’t call me back. So then I said, “Call me.” And then like “You never called me back. It’s so annoying.” 

Matthew Hussey:

Now again, when she says, “Call me,” it’s kind of like, you know, barking something someone, but without actually really expressing your standard or that you’re not interested in continuing to text. Obviously, there’s a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that, but simply barking at someone “Call me” again isn’t necessarily the best way to go about it. 

She then says, “You never called me back. It’s so annoying.” Now we know why she’s saying that she’s being— in a way she’s being authentic, like “This is really annoying.” It is really annoying. We’re all annoyed for her watching this. But, when she says that, it actually has the opposite effect of what she wants. She wants him to call her. But by saying “You never called me back, it’s so annoying.” She’s actually just giving him more attention for the thing that she doesn’t want. In a way, she’s rewarding the behavior. 

By saying to a person, “It’s so annoying.” You’re really saying, “I like you so much. I really want you to call me and you’re not calling me, and that’s annoying because I like you and I want you to call me.” It’s just another form of attention for someone who doesn’t deserve the attention. 

And the other thing about this sentence is that, it has no power to it, right? It’s not a standard. Because, in a way, this sentence is saying it’s annoying that you haven’t called me back, but I’m not going to do anything about it, right? It’s a disempowered statement. 

Now, let’s imagine that none of what I’ve suggested happened and that the communication had kept going exactly the way it did. Let’s find another moment where she could have intercepted this pattern. And by the way, that’s the beauty of communication. There’s so many different moments that even if we’ve been stuck in a certain way of being with someone for a long time, we can take the off-ramp and do something different. 

By the way, before we continue, if you enjoy this style of advice from me, if you’re thinking, “God, I would love to be in the hot seat getting very specific advice for my scenario, getting a play-by-play for what I’m going through right now”, go and try Matthew AI, we just released this last week, people’s minds have already been blown by it. People have given it thousands and thousands of specific scenarios and got their questions answered. So go over to AskMH.com you can literally call it and speak your question, you don’t even have to type it, and you will hear my voice giving you an answer. You can give as much detail as you want. You can be as specific as you want. It will take all of your situation into account before giving you an answer. And it’s been trained on 17 years of my content so that what you hear is not some generic internet answer. It’s my answer, exclusively from me and my content. 

So go check it out. AskMH.com is the link. Ask your question for free right now. I can’t wait to hear your feedback, because, like I said, this has been blowing people’s minds, and I can’t wait to hear the same from you. 

All right, back to this text exchange. 

Speaker 1:

“Nice. What are you doing?” 

What am I doing right now?

Speaker 2:

Nothing. You’re not responding. 

Speaker 1:

No?

Speaker 2: 

It’s done.

Matthew Hussey:

You even see there the encouragement from her friends to say, “Do nothing.” You know, “You just don’t respond,” which is another version of having one’s guard up and wanting to look aloof instead of actually communicating. 

So again, all this does is enable his behavior, because when he comes back three days from now or the next day and texts her, and she texts back, what she’s really communicated is “I’m just going to disappear on you at random moments. Not say why, not say that your behavior isn’t enough for me, but instead, just look like I’m indifferent and I don’t care that much, even though, right now, I have your text messages projected onto a screen in front of all my friends.” 

Now let’s say that she does send that last message that she’s around if he wants to give her a call, and it would be great to catch up properly. And let’s say that he says, in reply, “I’m out with my boys tonight. How’s your evening?” So he still dismisses the phone call, albeit, because he’s busy. We don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that when she replies to that, she shows that she’s not interested in carrying on this text exchange. 

So she would then say, “No worries. Have a great evening. Catch up tomorrow when you can talk.” So she’s not entertaining his question, not out of rudeness, but out of the fact that she’s given him different opportunities to get on the phone and have a conversation with her today, he’s made it impossible at every turn. And so now she’s not being cold, she’s saying, “Have a great night, but let’s catch up tomorrow when you can call,” which is also a standard, right? I’m basically saying, don’t contact me tomorrow, unless it’s a phone call. 

Now let’s put a cap on this, because I know what you’re thinking. What if he sends her a text tomorrow instead of calling? What if he reaches out to her and says, “How’s your day going?” Right? Which starts to feel like a form of gaslighting that I keep saying the same thing, and you keep acting like I haven’t said it like you have amnesia for me asking for a phone call. Here’s what she could say. 

And so far, what we’ve been communicating with these amended texts is an indirect standard. Here’s where you can get more direct. And I love this message that I’m about to give you. I want you to be brave enough to send it if you ever find yourself in a situation like this. 

Here’s what you write. “I don’t know if I’m going crazy, but it feels like way too much effort to get you on the phone for a real conversation. I don’t mind texting in general, but these short exchanges just aren’t all that rewarding. Lol, are you only interested in texting?” 

I like the “I don’t know if I’m going crazy,” because it allows you to kind of almost point out that, you know, maybe you’ve judged him too soon. Maybe there is a legitimate reason why, yesterday, last night, and the first half of today, he couldn’t do the simple thing that you had mentioned and kept pretending like you weren’t mentioning it. So I like that start. 

I love the idea of, “It feels like way too much effort to get you on the phone for a real conversation,” because what you’re really saying there is “This isn’t sustainable. I’m not going to keep putting in this amount of effort.  I’m not going to ignore the elephant in the room, that I’m trying harder than you are to have a real conversation.” I’m pointing out that I am trying to get a phone call with you, and that it’s too much work, so I’m not going to keep putting in that much effort. 

And then you’re saying that you don’t mind texting in general, it’s not that you have a problem with texting. It’s simply that this style of communication, especially his style, which is really dry and short, is not rewarding. It might be different if he was sending amazing text messages, which he’s not, but what she’s getting isn’t rewarding, and she’s pointing that out, “Hey, I have a higher standard for being entertained in conversation than this. This isn’t enough for me. This isn’t worth my time. Are you only interested in texting?” 

So this is a very empowered response. It gives someone nowhere to go. They can’t exactly keep texting you and pretend that it’s all okay after you’ve said that, can they? 

Now I want to point out that I don’t know this person’s situation. I don’t know the conversations that have preceded this text exchange. So while I’m having some fun talking about what she could have said, for all I know, this lovely human being had a massive fight with this person right before this text exchange, and that’s why she’s being so short in her replies. But the principles of this video still stand. 

And, you know, it’s always fun when I get more context, I’m often like, “Ah, well, if that’s the case, then I would send this instead,” which, you know if you’ve ever been coached by me or worked with me in my love life club, you know that more context helps. It’s why, by the way, Matthew AI is such a cool thing for you to be able to use, because you can give it all the context in the world. You can tell Matthew AI everything that you’re going through, how the last exchange was, that you want it to be a bit more like this, or to take account of that, and it will help you figure out what something means, what you can do about it and what you can say next. 

So before you leave this video, do me a favor. Go over to AskMH.com and ask your question of Matthew AI. You can even if you want to do a version of what we just did in this video. Upload your text exchange or your conversation, and it will help you understand it and know what to say and do next. 

So go check it out. AskMH.com  is that link again. And I can’t wait to know what you think. I’ll see you next week. Be well, love life, and thanks for watching you.