How long should the talking stage last?

EQTiger Editorial · Sources checked 2026-10-26 · Expert review pending

Nobody has studied the right number

"Talking stage" is a recent name for an old in-between. You are in touch most days, maybe you have been out once or twice, and neither of you has said what it is. We looked for research on how long this phase lasts or should last and did not find any. Advice that says "three weeks" or "two months" is somebody's opinion, and that includes the pace suggested further down this page.

What research does offer is indirect: how closeness builds, what you can and cannot learn before meeting someone, and why this phase exists in the first place.

Count hours together, not weeks

The closest thing to a measurement comes from friendship research. Jeffrey Hall asked 355 adults who had recently moved, and later 112 first-year college students, how much time they had spent with new acquaintances. More hours went with closer friendships, time spent hanging out counted for more than time working side by side, and among the students, hours together predicted growing closeness over nine weeks (Hall, 2019). In the paper Hall estimated that moving from acquaintance to casual friend took roughly 50 hours together, and reaching close friend took more than 200. Those were friendships, the hours were people's own estimates, and romance may move faster. The lesson still carries over: closeness follows time spent together, not days on a calendar.

That changes how to read your own situation:

Five weeks can mean almost nothing or quite a lot. When a friend asks "How long have you been talking?", the more useful question is how much time you have actually spent with this person.

What a month of messages cannot tell you

Texting feels like getting to know someone, and in part it is. It is poor at answering the question you most need answered, which is whether the two of you work in person.

When researchers measured more than 100 traits and preferences in single adults before a round of speed dates, the data could say a little about who tended to be choosy and who tended to be wanted, but nothing about which specific pairs would hit it off (Joel, Eastwick, and Finkel, 2017). Chemistry between two particular people only showed up once they met. A separate set of studies found that as classmates got to know each other over a semester, their agreement about who was desirable shrank and their judgments became more personal to each pair (Eastwick and Hunt, 2014). Both used opposite-sex samples and early attraction rather than long relationships. Read together, they suggest that the person you have built from weeks of messages is partly your own projection, and meeting is how you swap the projection for a person.

Why this stage exists now

A generation ago, more couples met through friends, who did some of the vetting for you ("He's great, he's just terrible at texting"). For heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online overtook meeting through friends around 2013, and fewer online couples were introduced by anyone at all (Rosenfeld, Thomas, and Hausen, 2019). With no mutual friend to ask, a stretch of cautious talking makes sense. It is a screening period you run yourself.

It also explains why two people in the same talking stage can want very different things. Among Americans who had used a dating site or app in the past year, 44 percent said finding a long-term partner was a major reason and 40 percent said casual dating was (Pew Research Center, 2023). People could give both answers, but the split means the person on the other end of your chat may be after something quite different from you, and the talking stage will not reveal it unless one of you asks.

Signs it is moving, signs it has stalled

A stalled talking stage is not proof they are uninterested. Some people are shy, swamped or slow to commit to a plan. But weeks of drift after you have made a clear invitation usually means lower interest than yours. The page on reading mixed signals covers how to ask once and what to do with the reply.

One pattern is different in kind. If someone you have never met keeps putting off a video call, has a dramatic reason for being far away, and eventually needs money, that is the shape of a romance scam. In 2022 nearly 70,000 people reported romance scams to the Federal Trade Commission, with $1.3 billion in reported losses; claims of an overseas military posting, an oil rig job, a sudden emergency or a crypto investing tip were among the most common stories (Federal Trade Commission, 2023). No genuine match needs a gift card or a wire transfer from you.

A pace that keeps it from becoming a holding pattern

This is our suggestion, not a research finding, and you can adjust it to your life:

1. Within about two weeks of regular messaging, suggest meeting. Coffee or a walk, an hour, somewhere public. If distance rules that out, a video call.
2. Over the next three to six dates, notice whether plans get easier. You are not grading the person. You are noticing whether arranging time together feels like a joint effort.
3. Once you would be hurt to learn they are still seeing others, ask. For many people that point comes somewhere in the first two or three months, and the script for the "where is this going" conversation has the words.
4. A month in, still not met despite a clear invitation? Decide whether to stop. You do not owe anyone an open-ended talking stage.

Calla's five weeks with Wyatt

Calla matched with Wyatt in early September. They texted every day: songs, photos of his dog, long exchanges about their jobs that ran past midnight. Twice they made plans, and twice he moved them, once for a work trip and once without much of a reason. Five weeks in, she has spent no time in a room with him and knows his opinion of forty albums.

She sends this on a Tuesday afternoon rather than at midnight:

I've really liked talking to you. I'd like to actually meet before this turns into a pen-pal thing. Are you free Saturday or Sunday afternoon?

If he picks a day and shows up, the talking stage has done its job. If he says "This week is crazy but soon!", she has already decided to reply warmly once and then stop carrying the conversation:

No worries. If you want to grab a coffee when things calm down, let me know.

After that she stops being the one who writes first. Whatever happens next will tell her more than another five weeks of messages.

Talking to more than one person

Early on, this is common and usually fine, as long as nobody has been told otherwise. What tends to hurt is finding out late, after one person had assumed things were exclusive. If you are talking to several people and one starts to matter, say so to that person ("I'm not really talking to anyone else now"), or wind the others down. And if the person you were hoping for turns out to be talking to others, that tells you about their pace. It is not a betrayal unless the two of you had agreed otherwise.

Ending a talking stage that is going nowhere

You do not need a formal breakup after three dates, but fading out is harder on the other person than it looks from your side. A short message closes it cleanly:

I've enjoyed talking with you, but I'm not feeling this turning into more. I'd rather say so than fade out. Take care.

For relationships that went further, see how to end things kindly, and if you were the one left with silence, there is a page on coping when someone ghosts you. If the waiting is what is wearing you down, anxious texting while dating has a plan for the first hour of a spiral, and the dating and new relationships guide maps the rest of the early stages.

Start with the free EQTiger assessment (adults 18+), or go back to the Relationship Center.