How often you talk when you are not together

Time is the only thing on this list that cannot be faked, borrowed, or produced by good manners. Everybody has the same amount of it and nobody has any spare.

How to read it

Being in touch when there is no reason to be is the whole signal. Messages with a purpose are logistics. Messages with no purpose at all are somebody spending an evening on you instead of on something else they could have been doing.

Late conversations are worth more than daytime ones, and not because of what gets said in them. They are worth more because of what was given up in order to have them.

When it means nothing

Replies are not the same as messages. Somebody who always answers and never starts is being polite, and a good response rate is the easiest thing in the world to mistake for interest. Count who opens the conversation rather than who continues it.

Your move

Go quiet for three days and count what happens. This is the only test here that runs itself while you do nothing.