Is he losing interest? The five signs you can actually measure

If you're asking the question, you've already noticed something. The replies feel slower. The messages got shorter. You're the one starting the conversation more than you used to. The problem is that every one of those has an innocent explanation, and at 1am you can't tell the difference between "he's busy this week" and "he's been busy for six weeks."

The chat itself can. Every message has a timestamp and a sender. Put them together and interest turns into five numbers you can look at week by week.

1. Reply time, and its shape

Not the average. The shape. Someone who's busy replies slowly for a week and then snaps back. Someone who's pulling away replies a little slower every week, and it never comes back. On a chart, busy is a spike and losing interest is a staircase. The slowest quarter of his replies each week is the number to watch, because that's where the change shows up first.

2. Who starts the conversation

In a chat that's going well, opening a conversation is roughly a coin flip. When someone's fading, the split moves: you start four out of five, then nine out of ten, and you stop noticing because each individual time feels normal. Counted over a month, it's the clearest sign there is.

3. Dry replies

"lol", "yeah", "ok", "haha". Three words or fewer, no question, no emoji. Everyone sends some. What matters is the share. Someone who used to write full sentences and now sends 40% one-word replies has changed how they text you, whether or not they've noticed.

4. Double texts and being left on read

Count the times you sent a second message before getting a reply to the first, and the times a conversation ended on your message with nothing back. Then count his. If one column is growing and the other isn't, the effort isn't mutual anymore.

5. The week it changed

The most useful number isn't any of the above. It's the date. When all five move in the same direction in the same week, there's usually a reason, and you'll often remember what happened that week once you see it. That's the difference between "I feel like something changed" and "it changed the week of 12 August."

What the chat can't tell you

Why. The numbers can show that he changed and when, not what's going on in his life. Read them as a prompt for one honest question, not as a verdict on him. And run the same numbers on yourself. About one in four people who check find out they faded first.