There's a whole genre of advice that says the secret is to wait. Let them sweat. Reply in four hours even if you saw it in 2 seconds. Never double text. Treat the conversation like a hostage negotiation where the first one to seem interested loses.
I think that advice is junk and I think it's the actual reason people sound desperate.
Here's what I mean. When you sit on a text you want to send, watching the clock, calculating the cool amount of time to wait, you are not being mysterious. You are being someone whose entire evening is organized around a text. That energy leaks. It comes out in the message you finally send, which is somehow both too careful and too eager, because you've been staring at it for two hours. Performed indifference and real desperation produce the exact same text. Funny how that works.
So forget timing. Timing was never the problem.
The problem is what you delete.
You write "I'd love to, I'm free Saturday," then you panic and soften it to "I'm pretty flexible, whatever works for you!" You had a preference. You had a Saturday. Then you sanded it off so they wouldn't feel any pressure, and what's left is a person made entirely of accommodation. That's the thing that reads as desperate. Not that you replied fast. That you vanished.
Confidence in a text is just the willingness to still be in it. To have a night you'd rather, an opinion about where to go. "Whatever you want" isn't generous. It tells them there's nothing of you to bump into.
Watch the difference.
yes!! totally up to you, I'm free whenever, just lmk!! 😄
versus
Yes. I'm around Saturday, there's a wine bar near me I've been wanting to try. That work?
Same yes. Same interest, if anything more of it in the second one, because the second came from a person with a life and a Saturday she had plans for, and the first came from a hostage. You don't sound keener by adding exclamation points. You sound keener by having somewhere you'd actually like to take them.
The double text thing, while we're here. Everyone's terrified of it. You send a message, hear nothing, and the urge rises to send another, then a "haha," then a "no worries if not!" to defuse the first two. Don't. Not because double texting is a sin, but because each follow up is you handing them more of your nervous system to hold. If you sent something real and they haven't answered, the most appealing thing you can do is go do something else. Not as a tactic. Because you have a life and it's Tuesday and there's dinner to make.
That's the whole thing, really. Stop managing how you come across and go be a person who's a little hard to fully sum up. The texts get easy after that.