A few years ago, a hot guy started following me on Instagram. “Very nice,” I said to myself in Borat’s voice. Still got it. Then, he started replying to my Instagram stories. A laughing reaction here, a “haha” reply there. He was clearly flirting with me! After a few weeks of consistent interaction, I told a co-worker about “this guy on Instagram who is, like, obsessed with me”. She demanded I show his profile. “Why certainly,” I said, grinning like a fisherman wielding a juicy mackerel. “Babe,” she said. “He’s a reply guy. He does this to everyone.”
After taking some time to painstakingly remove the dagger from my heart, I asked for more information. She told me that a “reply guy” is a person – typically male – who exists in the inboxes of multiple women simultaneously. His modus operandi is simple: start and maintain multiple low-effort conversations with as many warm bodies as possible. But his motives? Largely unclear.
I posted about this phenomenon on Instagram, eager to know how many others had been on the receiving end of a reply guy’s replies. The response was overwhelming.
“Story of my life,” one respondent told me. “I have had the same reply guys come out of the woodwork every time I’m single.” People told me stories of reply guys who had been messaging them for years – some would be legally entitled to long service leave. “I replied to one guy and said, ‘We should just get a drink instead of liking stories’, and he stopped.”
And therein lies the inherent contradiction of the reply guy: when a target finally responds, he retreats.
@makeupbyalessandra, a creator and make-up artist in Melbourne, went viral on TikTok after sharing her own experience with a reply guy. She describes a man she had been speaking to for a month and a half while she was on holiday in Europe. “He was very keen, commenting on my stories, asking me to send updates and photos, saying he can’t wait for me to be back,” she says. “The minute I got back to Melbourne? Crickets.” Still, he maintained the replies. When she posted a photo of herself looking “fire”, he was right back in her inbox: “You are something else.”
This phenomenon differs from other dating foibles, such as breadcrumbing (giving morsels of attention but never the full cake of commitment) or orbiting (remaining in someone’s periphery). Unlike more traditional cases of being “led on”, true reply guys aren’t hanging around hoping for casual sex. This fact frustrates many of the women I spoke to – they’d actually prefer transactional intimacy over taking care of a Tamagotchi with limited conversational skills. “Fuckboys don’t even want to fuck any more,” one woman told me. “It’s annoying and weird.”
What confounds most women I spoke to is the “why” behind this behaviour. Surely they aren’t actually interested in whether you had steak or salmon for dinner. Maintaining a never-ending dialogue is reminiscent of after-school evenings chatting to randoms on Club Penguin. As an adult, these digital relationships feel like a waste of time. And yet, women all over the world find themselves holed up on a Tuesday night, answering questions like “what’s your McDonald’s order?” from someone who doesn’t even have the courtesy to take them out for a 75c cone.
To make matters worse, many women report that they later discovered that their most loyal reply guys had actually been in relationships the entire time. I spoke to the ex-girlfriend of a notorious reply guy. “While we were together, he was endlessly messaging other women, and just like commenting on their stories, complimenting them and asking what they had for dinner,” she told me. “Turns out he never actually met up with any of them. It wasn’t even anything sexual … the messages were often pretty mundane and would go on for ages.” When she confronted him about it, he said he was seeking women’s validation. “I think a lot of these reply guys are in relationships, seeing someone else or happy jacking off. They just want female attention because of their self-induced loneliness.”
Then it hit me. There could be a solution to the reply guy. And that’s the reply guy. What if, like injecting snake venom to quell a bite, we all added our favourite reply guy to a humongous group chat? We could introduce them by name and share a few fun facts (Jarrod loves hummus, Matt is more into carrot-and-cashew) before letting them loose to create new connections based on common interests (something they’re experts in finding). There would be an environmental impact – the cloud would likely explode due to the sheer volume of messages. But maybe – and stay with me here – this could be the answer to the male loneliness epidemic? There’s only one way to find out.
• Lucinda Price is an author and comedian who goes by the name Froomes
