How Soon is Too Soon?

[Deviant]

So, you meet someone on a MU. You hit it off. The chemistry is good, the conversation flows easily and naturally, and you start thinking about all the fun things you might do together.

And then… silence. You don’t hear from them, they stop logging in, and you aren’t sure how to reach them outside of the game.

How long do you wait before reaching out?

Is it like dating etiquette? Is three days too soon to “call”? Do you send a casual @mail after a week? Do you wait two weeks before asking mutual acquaintances if they’ve seen them? At what point does a public “Hey, I really enjoyed our time together, are you still alive?” go from potentially endearing to mildly unhinged?

Obviously, real life happens, people get busy, and nobody owes anybody their time. I can’t even throw pebbles in that house, I’m extremely guilty of it.

But sometimes you find an RP partner you really click with, and you’re left wondering whether they’re coming back or whether you’ve just experienced the MU* equivalent of a fantastic first date followed by ghosting.

So what’s the etiquette? How long do you wait before putting out a missed-connections ad for someone you really enjoyed playing with?

Asking for a friend. Who is me. And who would very much like a second date scene.

[Aria]

@Deviant I have only ever reached out through a mutual acquaintances once and it was because something was very clearly wrong.

I’d been RPing with this person for about two months. All our scenes were great. We were chatting in pages pretty regularly. Then one night in the middle of a scene, they logged off very abruptly. Literally, it was without any warning at all. A few days later I logged in to a message from them apologizing for that and explaining that a family member had a medical emergency. They hoped to be back soon.

They did not come back soon. They did not come back after several weeks. In fact, they didn’t come back at all. So between knowing that something serious was up and some very clear signals that the game wasn’t going to last much longer, I reached out to someone I knew they were already friends with prior to joining. It felt very awkward, but I did tell that friend of theirs something that was basically: “Hey, I hope this isn’t super weird, but I know you and Player are tight. Would you mind passing my contact info on to them? It’s cool if you’d rather not. It just seems like they’re going through something rough right now and I want to make sure they’re okay.”

I got a message on Discord a couple of weeks later. The aforementioned Player was very much Not Okay because of real life things, wasn’t able to RP anywhere or with anyone for another several months, but was actually really happy I reached out. Apparently a lot of people they’d known for much longer hadn’t taken the time to check on them after they disappeared, which they weren’t feeling great about.

We’ve now been friends for three years, but I don’t attribute that to contacting them through a third party to say, “Hey! I miss your RP so much! Come back.” There was no pressure whatsoever to play there or anywhere else. I attribute it to contacting them through a third party to say, “Hey. Are you okay?”