It seems to be commonly accepted that the quicker a girl takes to reply, the more attracted she is.

In my experience, sometimes it can take as long as 12 hours for a response, but as long as the response itself is lengthy/meaningful, then I believe that to be a bigger IOI than a girl responding quickly with a terse or mundane response.

My reasoning is this:

- If a girl takes hours to respond, it means that at some point, she has to REMEMBER to respond. It takes a conscious effort for her to come back to the task of response after many hours. This is in contrast to messages that you receive, snap out a response to and then forget.

- This rests on the assumption that the reply is good, not just a blow-off message.

It will also depend on the girl of course. As another point of personal experience, I've had very receptive girls who sometimes take 3-4 hours on average to reply and less interested girls reply quicker.

Thoughts?

I think I would respectfully disagree.

It's true that sometimes a girl might not hear the phone, or just be too busy to reply immediately (driving, working, etc.), so it could happen that you would get a delayed response occasionally. And yes, though it's getting rarer, some people don't really that close of a relationship with their phones. And I would think it is definitely a sign of interest that she made the mental note to get back to you, especially if she was apologetic in the reply.

But I don't think that always taking a few hours to reply would be a general sign of interest. Generally, most people rarely venture more than half an arm's reach away from their phones, and will therefore see a text message immediately when it arrives. So if they're always taking hours to reply, it's probably because they're choosing not reply immediately.