‘Reply guys’ exist in the inboxes of multiple women simultaneously. When a target finally responds, they retreat. Why? | Lucinda Price

A couple of years in the past, a scorching man began following me on Instagram. “Very good,” I stated to myself in Borat’s voice. Nonetheless received it. Then, he began replying to my Instagram tales. A laughing response right here, a “haha” reply there. He was clearly flirting with me! After a number of weeks of constant interplay, I advised a co-worker about “this man on Instagram who’s, like, obsessive about me”. She demanded I present his profile. “Why actually,” I stated, grinning like a fisherman wielding a juicy mackerel. “Babe,” she stated. “He’s a reply man. He does this to everybody.”After taking a while to painstakingly take away the dagger from my coronary heart, I requested for extra data. She advised me {that a} “reply man” is an individual – sometimes male – who exists within the inboxes of a number of ladies concurrently. His modus operandi is easy: begin and keep a number of low-effort conversations with as many heat our bodies as potential. However his motives? Largely unclear.I posted about this phenomenon on Instagram, desirous to know what number of others had been on the receiving finish of a reply man’s replies. The response was overwhelming.“Story of my life,” one respondent advised me. “I’ve had the identical reply guys come out of the woodwork each time I’m single.” Folks advised me tales of reply guys who had been messaging them for years – some can be legally entitled to lengthy service depart. “I replied to at least one man and stated, ‘We should always simply get a drink as an alternative of liking tales’, and he stopped.”And therein lies the inherent contradiction of the reply man: when a goal lastly responds, he retreats.@makeupbyalessandra, a creator and make-up artist in Melbourne, went viral on TikTok after sharing her personal expertise with a reply man. She describes a person she had been chatting with for a month and a half whereas she was on vacation in Europe. “He was very eager, commenting on my tales, asking me to ship updates and photographs, saying he can’t look ahead to me to be again,” she says. “The minute I received again to Melbourne? Crickets.” Nonetheless, he maintained the replies. When she posted a photograph of herself wanting “hearth”, he was proper again in her inbox: “You’re one thing else.”This phenomenon differs from different relationship foibles, similar to breadcrumbing (giving morsels of consideration however by no means the complete cake of dedication) or orbiting (remaining in somebody’s periphery). In contrast to extra conventional instances of being “led on”, true reply guys aren’t hanging round hoping for informal intercourse. This reality frustrates most of the ladies I spoke to – they’d truly desire transactional intimacy over taking good care of a Tamagotchi with restricted conversational abilities. “Fuckboys don’t even need to fuck any extra,” one lady advised me. “It’s annoying and bizarre.”What confounds most girls I spoke to is the “why” behind this behaviour. Absolutely they aren’t truly involved in whether or not you had steak or salmon for dinner. Sustaining a unending dialogue is harking back to after-school evenings chatting to randoms on Membership Penguin. As an grownup, these digital relationships really feel like a waste of time. And but, ladies everywhere in the world discover themselves holed up on a Tuesday evening, answering questions like “what’s your McDonald’s order?” from somebody who doesn’t even have the courtesy to take them out for a 75c cone.To make issues worse, many ladies report that they later found that their most loyal reply guys had truly been in relationships your entire time. I spoke to the ex-girlfriend of a infamous reply man. “Whereas we had been collectively, he was endlessly messaging different ladies, and identical to commenting on their tales, complimenting them and asking what that they had for dinner,” she advised me. “Seems he by no means truly met up with any of them. It wasn’t even something sexual … the messages had been usually fairly mundane and would go on for ages.” When she confronted him about it, he stated he was in search of ladies’s validation. “I feel a number of these reply guys are in relationships, seeing another person or pleased jacking off. They only need feminine consideration due to their self-induced loneliness.”Then it hit me. There may very well be an answer to the reply man. And that’s the reply man. What if, like injecting snake venom to quell a chew, all of us added our favorite reply man to a humongous group chat? We may introduce them by title and share a number of enjoyable info (Jarrod loves hummus, Matt is extra into carrot-and-cashew) earlier than letting them unfastened to create new connections primarily based on frequent pursuits (one thing they’re consultants find). There can be an environmental impression – the cloud would doubtless explode because of the sheer quantity of messages. However possibly – and stick with me right here – this may very well be the reply to the male loneliness epidemic? There’s just one strategy to discover out. Lucinda Worth is an writer and comic who goes by the title Froomes