The invitation left on read

Some open messages are questions, and the question has a date in it. Do you fancy a drink Thursday. Are you around the weekend of the twelfth. We're doing a thing for Dan's fortieth, can you come. These are the messages that stay open longest, because they need an answer and you don't have one yet. You'd like to go. You're not sure you can. You'll know by the end of the week. So you leave it, and the maybe stays open on their phone in a way that's worse than a no.

Here's why. A no is information. The friend can plan around it, invite someone else, or ask you for a different date. A maybe with no words attached isn't a maybe to them. It's a silence, and they read it as chapter 4, which is to say they read it as a no delivered without the courtesy. And when you finally answer, on the day before, with a yes, the yes carries the surcharge of having left them hanging. When you answer with a no, you've spent a fortnight of their uncertainty to deliver the answer you could have given on day one.

The belief is that a maybe keeps your options open. It keeps your options open. It closes theirs. And it costs you something you don't see, which is that the friend learns to invite you later, or with less notice, or last, because you're the one who doesn't answer. Invitations go to the people who reply. That's not a punishment. It's how people plan.

The fix is to answer the question you can answer today, which is nearly always one of three. Yes. No. Or "I'd like to, don't know yet, I'll tell you by Friday", which is a real maybe, with a date on it, and it does the friend's planning for them. That third one is the one people don't send, because it feels like an admission that you can't organise your life. It isn't. It's the most useful message in this book, because it converts an open question into a closed one with a deadline, and by chapter 3 a deadline is exactly what a reply needs. Say Friday and Friday will come and you'll answer, because you said you would.

One more thing about the no. It's allowed. You don't have to want to go to Dan's fortieth. The earlier book You could have said no is about saying it, and this book only adds that a no sent today keeps a friend, and a maybe never sent loses one, and the two take the same fifteen seconds.