Nobody Gets Ghosted by Us

The worst thing a company can make you feel is the same thing a person can make you feel. You wrote. Nothing came back.

Everyone has a version of it. The support form that returns an auto-reply and then silence. The ticket number you can recite from memory because you’ve checked it that many times. The “we’ve received your message” that turns out to be the entire relationship. You sent a real question into a real inbox and the inbox decided you weren’t worth a sentence. That’s a ghost. It just has a logo.

This week the blog has been about ghosting between people, and the research is clear that a direct no hurts less than silence. I want to write about the company version, because it’s the same rule, and because it’s the one decision Pat and I made early that I’d defend against anybody.

The 24-hour rule

If you’re an LFGdating member and you write to us, a human answers within 24 hours. That’s been the guarantee since the beginning. Not a bot, not a canned paragraph with your first name pasted into the greeting, not a knowledge-base link. A person who read what you wrote.

And the person is usually one of us. We don’t have a generic support address that routes into a queue somewhere. Members write to our personal email accounts. I’ve said before that we don’t hide behind a corporate banner of anonymity, and I meant it literally: my name is on the site, Pat’s name is on the site, and the reply you get has one of those names at the bottom.

I’ve walked out of a date night to email a member who had a question about the site. Pat has given face time to his computer in the middle of family holidays to do the same. I’m not telling you that to make us sound noble; I’m telling you because “24 hours” is a number, and numbers are only real if somebody actually eats the cost of hitting them. We eat it. It’s been thirteen years and we still eat it.

Why it’s the same rule

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after a long time on both sides of an inbox. The thing that makes silence hurt isn’t the answer you didn’t get. It’s the decision you weren’t part of. Somebody, somewhere, looked at your message and chose not to reply, and you’ll never know when or why. You’re left guessing, and people guess badly about themselves.

That’s the whole reason ghosting between people is worse than a plain no, and it’s the whole reason a company that goes quiet on you feels like an insult rather than an inconvenience. Same mechanism. Same fix. Say something. The reply doesn’t have to be what you wanted. “No, we can’t do that, here’s why” is a complete answer. It closes the loop. Gamers already know this: gg after a loss isn’t a compliment, it’s a courtesy, and the courtesy is that the match is over and everyone can see it.

So the dating advice this week and the company policy are one sentence. You always get an answer. When you’re the one ending a conversation with a match, that means two lines instead of nothing. When you’re a company holding someone’s hope and fifteen dollars, it means a human within a day.

The human on the other end of the first thing you see

The reply guarantee is the loud version of the rule. The quiet version is profile review. Every new profile on LFGdating is looked at and approved by a human being before it goes live. That’s slower than an algorithm and more expensive than a checkbox, and it’s the thing that makes the first thing you see on the site a person instead of a maybe.

I don’t think of that as a safety feature, though it is one. I think of it as the same promise pointed the other direction. When you write to us, a human is there. When you look at a profile, a human was there. The site is built so that at no point are you talking to nobody.

What I can’t promise you

I can’t make anyone reply to you. Nobody running a dating site can, and if one says its members don’t ghost, I’d want to see how they measured that. A match is not a support ticket. People are going to be people, on our site and everywhere else, and some of them are going to go quiet.

What I can promise is that we won’t. The company will never be the ghost in your inbox. If the site does something confusing, if a charge looks wrong, if you just want to know how something works, you’ll hear from Pat or me. You’ll hear from us if the answer is “yes,” and you’ll hear from us if the answer is “no, and here’s why,” which, if you’ve read the rest of this week, you know is the answer that hurts least.

The best email we get

I’ll end with the email that’s the opposite of a ghost, because it’s my favorite thing about this job.

Every so often a paying member writes to cancel, and the reason is that they met someone here and don’t need us anymore. I’ve described that before as every great holiday wrapped up into one notification, and I stand by it. What I hadn’t noticed until this week is what those emails have in common with the 24-hour rule. Nobody has to send that email. You can just let a subscription lapse. But people write it anyway, because they want to close the loop with the two guys who answered their questions at midnight. They say gg on the way out.

We have two bottom lines here, and the first one is how many people are meeting and talking to each other every day. The second is money. That order is not a slogan; it’s why the cancellation email is a celebration and the unanswered inbox is unthinkable. A business that measures itself by connections can’t be in the business of leaving people hanging.

So: if you’re tired of writing into the void, on dating sites or anywhere else, the LFGdating app is free to download and signing up takes a couple of minutes. Write to us with any question you want. You’ll get a person. And if you’re on the other side of it this week, wondering whether to send the two-line no or just let a conversation die, tomorrow’s post has the scripts. Send the lines. It’s what we’d do.

Stay Classy,
Casey and Pat