How to Tell Girls You Don't Have Social Media

The other day a reader named Luon Di mentioned in a comment communicating to girls you’re not on social media:

Since then, she has been texting me daily. I try to keep our exchanges brief. We have a date planned in the next week. Early on, I thought I had lost her, after she asked for my social media and then she stopped replying after I answered why I don't have any (there are several reasons). This is becoming a recurring problem every time I meet a girl, and a major factor in why I have lost some very early on, despite me justifying it very reasonably to them. The next day she finally answered, empathetically.

In his case, in this particular incident, it worked out. But I would like to talk about those situations where girls give you pushback, go quiet, or act like it’s “weird.”

First off, I’m not going to write an article on the pros and cons of social media for men. I talked about that way back in 2012 regarding Facebook, and the exact same logic applies today to Instagram, TikTok, you name it. The same dynamics that were and are at play on Facebook then are at play on other social media apps today. The apps change but the dynamics don’t. You can get my opinion on it – then make up your own mind – in that earlier article.

This article is squarely aimed at guys who either are not on social media at all, or prefer not to share their social media with people (i.e., girls) they’ve just met. Maybe their follower counts aren’t all that impressive; or on the other hand maybe they share a lot of stuff on there they don’t want strangers to see.

If that’s you, read on, and we’ll talk about how to make this not a detriment for you with girls, but an actual advantage.

 

Social Media Only Helps with Very Weak Connections

First off: social media only helps you, generally speaking, when your connection with a girl is very weak.

That is to say: if you made a strong first impression on her (offline or on), she enjoyed the banter, your fundamentals are good, and she’s excited about what’s next with you, you not being on social media does not affect your chances with her a lick.

Now, if your connection is weak, and you have a VERY STRONG social media presence, that can help you turn the tide. Say you match with a girl on a dating app, where you already are lacking the kind of strong first impression girls get from meeting with you first in-person. The banter is okay but nothing special, and you and her don’t connect over any really unique shared commonalities. This is a WEAK connection.

If, however, you send her to a social media profile that shows you surrounded by cool, high status people, in a variety of expensive-looking environments, wearing high-end clothes, having lots of fun with beautiful women, with a high follower count, that can be enough to flip a switch in her that says, “Whoa. This guy seemed boring at first but he’s a FIND!”

There are also social media strategies for longer-term courtships, where you’re going to ping a girl every so often intermittently over a course of months to try to interest her enough to meet. However, you can do this just as effectively over the phone, with good texting, audio messages, video messages, bonding phone calls, and so on. If your social media’s already set up for it, you can use that, but if it isn’t, you don’t need it at all for this.

So really, the use case we are looking at for social media is that it helps most when:

1. The connection you had with the girl is weak, and

2. The social media account you send her to is VERY STRONG.

The rest of the time, social media is not going to be terribly useful.

If you want evidence of this, ask any guy you know who talks about how great his social media is for his love life to spool off how many recent lays and how far apart in time they were he got off social media… vs. how much time he spends carefully cultivating his social media image.

You will quickly see that social media is much like Narcissus staring into the pool; the one paying the most attention to what’s reflected back is YOU. Even with a very cool social media, most other people are only going to give you the most passing of glances. They’re too busy worrying about their own social media profiles to care much about yours.

 

Understand This About “SM or Bust” Scenarios

If you do not have social media, you will sometimes run into girls who ask if you have social media, then act as if it’s weird that you don’t, and then it’s over with those girls.

If only you had social media, amirite?

Here’s the thing though: if you HAVE social media, you will run into girls who ask if you have social media, then trade socials with you, then never talk to you again.

These two girls are the same girl!

The girl who says, “Oh, you don’t have social media? That’s unusual!” and ghosts is the same girl who will say, “Oh great, let’s connect on social media,” and (once you are connected) still ghosts.

These are girls who aren’t interested, for whatever reason, and are using social media as a brush off/buffer.

What if those girls seemed excited – until the social media thing happened?

It doesn’t matter. Plenty of girls will act excited when first talking to you even if they aren’t into you. Most women mirror the flirtation of the man they are talking to, even when attraction is missing. Guys will be thinking they had a great connection with a girl then scratch their heads when she disappears. The connection was an illusion. If you want to know if she’s really on-board with you, ask her to invest. Get her to comply!

Don’t feel bad about girls who give you the ol’, “Oh, you’re not on social media? Oh. Well you should get on there. Bye,” routine. That’s not how women think about or deal with men they’re attracted to or excited about. If you had social media, you would’ve gotten a different response: “Great, now we’re connected on social media!” but the end result (she disappears without a trace – save for that fruitless, vestigial social media connection) remains the same.

 

Generally Speaking, Social Media Doesn’t Matter

I hope you’re getting the message here: except in very rare cases, having or not having social media doesn’t matter.

A girl who likes you will be happy to communicate with you over social media or happy to communicate with you over a messaging app. Even over phone calls and SMS! Even email (well, if she REALLY likes you!).

A girl who doesn’t like you will insist she can only speak on social media and then, should you have social media and connect with her on it, she’ll just never or very minimally speak to you on it despite being connected. Another follower for her follower count filled with simps, stans, and guys who tried to make a pass at her but ended up a statistic. If you don’t have social media, on the other hand, she’ll just be slightly disappointed she can’t use you to add a +1 to her follower count, but then will go on her merry way.

So, it doesn’t matter.

You’re not generally missing out on anything by not having some built-up social media.

So long as you are doing a decent job with women in-person or online, a lack of social media is not going to lead to you missing out on any girls you would’ve gotten even if you had it. You get the girls you would’ve got, social media or not.

 

How to Tell Girls You Don’t Have Social Media

Let’s talk responding to social media requests now, in ways that aren’t just skillful, but cool, and that grab the frame.

All you have to do when a girl asks you for your socials is tell her you “don’t do” social media, then offer to add her somewhere else. For instance:

HER: Do you have Insta?

YOU: Oh, no, I don’t do social media. Let me add you on WhatsApp.

(or whatever your messaging app of choice is)

Assuming she’s into you, the general response to this is going to be, “Okay.”

If she’s curious, she may ask you about your reasons for not being on social media. My go-to answer is

I prefer to be real-life cool over Internet cool.

In case you don’t pick up on the status play in that answer:

• I’m telling her I’m cool.
• I’m telling her I’m cooler than people who use social media.
• As she uses social media, I am also telling her I’m cooler than her.
• Basically, I am telling her she’s a computer nerd.

READ MORE: How to Be Cool: 4 Lessons from Science and Hollywood

The reaction from girls tends to be a pretty uniform, “Oh, that is so cool,” or, “That is such a cool answer.”

I have a slightly different answer for girls who assume the close (i.e., they tell you to add them rather than ask if you’re on there):

HER: Add me on Insta.

YOU: Oh I got off there. Let me add you on WhatsApp.

Why does the response differ here? First off, she’s giving you a command, so you need a firmer status-elevating message here. In this case, by telling a girl you “got off there”, it makes it sound like you left a party that had turned lame. The implication is, if she’s still there, she hasn’t gotten the message yet and is still hanging out in the now-lame party.

Second off, because she’s being demanding, you’re not giving her the full details on whether you are on social media or not. She hasn’t earned those details yet. She can’t tell from this response whether you ARE on social media, just not on the one SHE is on (because you’ve jumped ship to a cooler one), or you just aren’t on social media AT ALL.

 

When Girls Try to Counter with Backup Social Options

When a girl’s go-to social media option goes off the table, sometimes she may try to counter with a backup option. This is most often the case with girls who are trying to brush you off or collect followers, and just don’t want to be connected with you in an explicitly messaging-focused way, but it also happens sometimes with girls who are total social media junkies and are just fixated on talking with everyone in their lives over social media.

Remember: you’re the man, you must lead. It’s not a huge inconvenience for her having to respond to you in WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, WeChat, or some other program. It’s not like you’re asking her to agree to write each other letters to be delivered via the mail. You’re not telling her you lack a phone and can only agree to meet her at a certain place and time. It’s another app in her phone, which she is already holding when she is posting her selfies on Instagram and beaming with pride over her latest round of upvotes. It takes two seconds to switch apps when she gets the notification from you and respond there. If she is even remotely interested in you, she will do it.

Thus, when she counters with backup social media options, you need to stand firm, hold frame, and continue to guide her toward a messaging app over a social media one.

Here is the gentler option:

HER: Add me on Insta.

YOU: Oh I got off there. Let me add you on WhatsApp.

HER: Are you on Facebook?

YOU: Nah, I got off there too. What do you use to message people?

You can then have a conversation with her that leads her toward a messaging app:

HER: Add me on Insta.

YOU: Oh I got off there. Let me add you on WhatsApp.

HER: Are you on Facebook?

YOU: Nah, I got off there too. What do you use to message people?

HER: Do you just not use social media?

YOU: Tried it. Found it time consuming. It’s just easier to message people.

HER: Oh, okay… well we can message on Telegram, do you have that?

YOU: Yeah, that’s fine.

This is a somewhat adversarial series of questioning by her, where she is trying to push you into using the app she wants while ignoring your question (e.g., she ignored your question about what she uses to message people and asked her own question about your social media use instead). It may mean she’s not really into you… or she just may be an impulsive personality type who’s trying to gather more information about an unusual situation (‘man lacks social media. Why?’).

You can also use a more teasing response, if you really want to grab the frame by the horns:

HER: Add me on Insta.

YOU: Oh I got off there. Let me add you on WhatsApp.

HER: Are you on Facebook?

YOU: Oh my God. Do you not use WhatsApp? What are you, a total social media junkie?

Your delivery here should be playful and teasing… a sort of half-shock, half-amusement reaction. You’re blown away by this girl’s social media obsession (she is the weird one here… really, she is; having a bunch of social apps and running everything through them isn’t healthy! Many women do this and make themselves depressed!).

Normally this will get her laughing at herself, and explaining how she’s just always on social media. As soon as she explains herself, you can explain yourself (but not before), and then figure out how the two of you will connect. For instance:

HER: Add me on Insta.

YOU: Oh I got off there. Let me add you on WhatsApp.

HER: Are you on Facebook?

YOU: Oh my God. Do you not use WhatsApp? What are you, a total social media junkie?

HER: [laughs] Yeah, I really am. I’m on it WAY too much!

YOU: All right, I’m going to help you break the addiction. Add me on WhatsApp.

HER: [laughs] Do you not use social media?

YOU: No, I broke the addiction already.

HER: [laughs] Okay. [adds you on WhatsApp]

Personally, I like this option better, but I’m a bit of a tease anyway.

If you can get a girl laughing at her excessive social media use, it’s generally going to go in your favor.

 

Wrap Up

Not having social media is not the end of the world.

In fact, it’s a BEGINNING of being more involved in the actual world… because a lot less of your attention is sucked up curating an online persona for people you barely know to stand in awe over (which they won’t actually do. FYI!).

Brush-offs you get over “not having social media” are not a sign that you “need to get on social media to stop losing these girls.” These same girls you lose “due to not having social media” would, if you had social media, be adding you, then never talking to you again there.

If a girl is interested in you, her switching over from staring at her follower count on a social media app to, instead, reading and responding to the message she just got from you on a messaging app, is NOT a huge deal. They are both on her phone and it takes seconds to switch between them. If she likes you, she will not care.

All our finagling about how to respond is really for the girls who are edge cases: the ones putting a little extra pressure on you to sniff you out a bit more before trading contacts with you, the impulsive ones who go straight to “Whaaaa… you don’t have XYZ social media??!” because they live their whole lives on there, and the girls who are curious to see how you react to them testing you on it: do you get awkward and fold, showing you’re not on there because you’re weird, or do you own it in a cool, high status way, showing you’re not on there because you are cool?

Respond cool, maintain the frame, and herd those girls over to a proper messaging app, instead of the social media poseur parade.

Chase Amante