There’s a woman I’ve seen around a few times. We’ve made eye contact, and I know her name. This is the entire foundation of our acquaintance, which makes it sound rather more established than it is.
I sent her a follow request on Instagram. She accepted it and followed me back. That was encouraging. It also brought me to the part of the process for which I had done no preparation: saying something.
We’ve never actually spoken. We don’t have mutual friends or some obvious shared activity I can mention. Her profile doesn’t offer much material, either. There’s no easy detail that gives me a natural opening, and I’d like to avoid sounding as though I’ve conducted a background check.
I want to start a conversation because I’m interested in her. Explaining that in a first message feels oddly difficult when our previous exchanges have consisted entirely of looking in each other’s direction.
The follow-back is nice, but it doesn’t tell me what she’d make of a message. Maybe she’d be happy to talk. Maybe she simply follows people back. Instagram has supplied the button and left the interpretation to me, which seems like an incomplete service.
I could wait for her to post a story and respond if there’s something to say. That would give the conversation a starting point beyond my sudden appearance in her inbox. It would also mean waiting for a social media update to do the work of an introduction.
So that’s where I am: mutual follows, no actual conversation, and an unexpectedly complicated relationship with the word “hey.” Do I send a simple message now, or wait until she posts something I can naturally respond to?
