We Looked at 1,800 First Messages. The Shortest Got Nearly Three Times the Replies of the Longest.

In August we read 482 opening messages and said we would come back when the sample was bigger. It is now nearly four times the size, so here it is.

This time we narrowed the question. We looked only at the first message a man sends a woman, because that is the message most advice is written about and the one we have the most of.

How we counted

The sample: every first message a man sent to a woman on Arranged from August 25 to October 22, 2026. That is 60 days and 1,800 messages. Seed profiles and test accounts are excluded.

What counts as a reply: the woman wrote anything back in that conversation. Not a date, not a long exchange. Any message at all.

What we did not count: first messages women sent to men. We did not analyse those, so nothing below says anything about them.

What we left out on purpose: time of day. Our timestamps are in UTC and the people on Arranged live in a lot of time zones, so "sent at 9pm" means something different for almost every sender. Rather than publish a number that looks precise and isn't, we dropped it.

Everything here is a correlation. A pattern in which messages got answered, not proof that changing your message would change the result. We also cannot see why anyone replied or didn't, so we have not guessed.

The headline numbers

Of the 1,800 first messages, 667 got a reply. That is 37%.

Among those that were answered, the median wait for the first reply was 5.5 hours. Half came faster than that and half slower. If you want more on the waiting itself, we looked at it in detail in how long to wait for a reply.

Thirty-seven per cent is much higher than the 9% in our August post. The two studies are not measuring the same thing. That one counted every first message in any direction, and this one counts only men writing to women over a different, longer stretch. Treat them as two separate snapshots rather than a trend line.

Length: shorter did better, very long did worst

This was the biggest gap in the data.

Under 20 characters is roughly "Hi, how's your week?" and it was answered more than half the time. Over 150 characters is a short paragraph, and fewer than one in five got a reply. That is about 2.9 times the reply rate for the shortest messages.

The middle two bands sit close together, at 38% and 41%. The jump is at the ends.

Look, this one contradicts what we published in August, when one-word openers did worst. We can't fully explain the reversal. The August sample was smaller, mixed both directions, and was skewed by one heavy sender. What we can say is that, in this larger sample of men writing to women, short did not hurt and long clearly underperformed.

Questions: a clear gap

First messages that contained a question mark were answered 50% of the time (230 of 462). Messages without one were answered 33% of the time (437 of 1,338).

That is about 1.5 times the reply rate. In August the sample was too small to say anything about questions. With 1,800 messages the gap is large enough that we are comfortable reporting it.

We did not split questions by length, so we can't tell you whether a short question beats a long one. Only that each pattern showed up on its own.

Day of the week: a modest weekend edge

Messages sent on Saturday and Sunday were answered 43% of the time combined (240 of 561), against 34% on weekdays.

Two caveats before you read too much into this table. First, each day has only a few hundred messages, and some far fewer. Tuesday's 49% comes from 141 messages, which is small enough that a couple of dozen replies either way would move it a lot.

Second, Wednesday. It had the most messages and the lowest rate, 25%. It is possible that a few men sending a lot of messages on particular Wednesdays pulled that number down. We can't fully separate that from the day itself, so we would not treat Wednesday as a bad day to write. With Wednesday set aside, the other weekdays average about 38%, and the weekend edge gets smaller.

So the honest version is: weekend sends did a bit better in this window. We wouldn't plan around it.

What we would actually tell someone

Ask a question. It was the cleanest pattern in the data, and it is the easiest change to make.

Keep it short, but make it about her. Short messages did best. A short line that references something on her profile gives her something to answer.

Save the paragraph for later. First messages over 150 characters were answered 18% of the time. If you have a lot to say, there is room for it once she has written back.

Don't stress about the day. Weekends did a bit better, but the gaps are small and the samples per day are small too.

What this does not tell you

It only covers Arranged, over 60 days. We would not assume the same numbers hold on another app with different people and different rules.

It only sees replies on Arranged. If a conversation moved somewhere else before anyone answered here, it counts as no reply.

And it can't tell you about any single woman. A 37% average says nothing about whether the person you are writing to will answer.

Frequently asked questions

What share of first messages get a reply on Arranged?

In this sample, 37%: 667 of 1,800 first messages men sent to women between August 25 and October 22, 2026. A reply means she wrote anything back in that conversation.

Are short or long first messages better?

In our data, messages under 20 characters were answered 52% of the time and messages of 150 characters or more were answered 18% of the time. The middle lengths landed around 40%. That is a correlation, not proof that cutting your message would change the outcome.

Does asking a question help?

First messages with a question mark got a reply 50% of the time, against 33% without one. It was one of the clearest patterns we found.

What is the best day to send a first message?

Weekend messages did a little better, 43% against 34% on weekdays. The per-day samples are small, though, and Wednesday's low rate may partly reflect a few heavy senders, so we would not treat any single day as best.

How long does a reply usually take?

Among first messages that got answered, the median wait was 5.5 hours. More in how long to wait for a reply.

Why didn't you report time of day?

Our timestamps are in UTC and people on Arranged live in many time zones, so the same hour means a different local time for different senders. A time-of-day chart from that data would look precise and be misleading.

Why are these results different from your August post?

The August post counted 482 first messages sent in any direction, over a shorter period, and one account sending the same line to hundreds of people skewed it. This one counts only men's first messages to women, and there are nearly four times as many. We expect the numbers to keep moving as the sample grows, and we'll say so when they do.