“People are afraid if they get too intimate, they won’t be accepted, so this is a way to delay that and prevent it,” she says. “They feel like they’re in a real relationship – they get all this attention, people see them getting texts and emails, they have society’s stamp of approval that they’re in a relationship – but they don’t have to deal with the intimacy factor. They don’t have to deal with their own sexual fears or admit any of their deep, dark secrets.”

A person who relentlessly pursues you online but never seals the deal in person may also be married or involved with someone else, Irwin warns. “It could be someone who’s bored in a relationship and doesn’t know how to recapture that honeymoon phase, so he or she is constantly reaching out and enjoying the fantasy of being with someone else,” she says. “Then, this person doesn’t have to look at the reality of his or her own situation.”

Set a personal timeline for moving past email

Match recently asked the question: What’s the average email exchange time between online daters before arranging an in-person date? Out of the poll’s more than 4,000 respondents, 30 percent said they emailed back and forth for three or more weeks before meeting, 43 percent emailed for one or two weeks before getting together in person, and nearly 28 percent sent out two or three emails at the most before making a date.

Regardless of whether you prefer to Afghan kvinnliga personer exchange three or 300 emails before meeting face-to-face, Irwin suggests setting some ground rules.

“Have a sense of humor about it, but tell the person you have a policy of exchanging only so many emails, then you talk on the phone, then you set up a coffee date,” she stresses. “If the person can’t deal with that, then he or she is delaying it, and you may want to take that as a warning signal that this person could be delaying a lot of other things in a relationship. Have your policy in place, and if your online crush keeps delaying, then move on.”

Schlosberg says capping her email exchanges helped her reach her goal: finding a marriage-minded mate. “I learned fairly early on about the endless emailing, and there’s no value in it,” she recalls. “You do need to go back and forth a few times, but really, just a few should suffice. I set the number at five emails. I felt like that was enough to figure out a match’s level of inquisitiveness and get a feel for that person’s sense of humor. That was enough to figure out whether someone was worth meeting or not.”

But Stephanie W., a 51-year-old marketing company executive from Dallas, believes the emails do have to be substantive to take things any further. “The quality of the email definitely counts,” she says. “When people are trying to be revealing and honest, that means a whole lot – certainly much more than if they just email, ‘How was your day?‘ Those people are blowing and going. They’re talking to a bunch of people.”

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More likely, though, she says the incessant emailing and excuses likely indicate having intimacy issues. “Some people are really just into the fantasy of a mate,” Irwin says. “And they feel like if they actually meet someone, that person will run away in horror because they don’t think they’re smart enough, good enough, or think that they’re socially inept or whatever. It’s more comfortable to not see the person behind the emails. They can control the relationship that way. They hold all the cards.”