Advice about emoji and dating tends to split into two camps: never use them because they look unserious, or use them freely because they add warmth a plain sentence can’t. Research on how people actually respond to emoji in early dating conversations suggests both camps are missing the more specific pattern the data shows.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2019 study by Amanda Gesselman, Vivian Ta, and Justin Garcia, published in PLOS One. The researchers surveyed 5,327 single American adults about how they used emoji when texting potential dates, then followed up with a second survey of 275 people to check the pattern held. People who used emoji more frequently reported more first dates and more sexual activity over the previous year, and in the second survey, more frequent emoji use before meeting in person predicted a greater chance of a second date and of the connection continuing at all. Gesselman, the study’s lead author and a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, offered a fairly ordinary explanation for why: texting strips out tone of voice and facial expression, and emoji appear to fill part of that gap, helping convey warmth and intent that a short message alone often can’t. But the researchers also asked participants directly how many emoji felt acceptable in a single message, and the answer wasn’t “more is better.” On average, three emoji in one message was the reported ceiling. Past that point, participants said it started to feel less charming and more overwhelming, the texting equivalent of someone sharing far too much personal detail before either person has any real context for it.
A second study adds a layer the first one doesn’t address: not just how much emoji to use, but which ones. In a 2022 study by David Rodrigues, Bernardo Cavalheiro, and Marília Prada, published in Telematics and Informatics, the researchers ran two experiments with 758 participants, testing how people interpreted first messages sent to a stranger on Facebook or Tinder that included different emoji, or none at all. The specific emoji included changed what intention the message was read as signaling. Certain emoji reliably came across as friendly, others as romantic, and others as sexual, and this held consistently whether the platform was a general social network or an explicitly romantic one like Tinder. Notably, about a third of participants chose to send no emoji at all in that first message, which the researchers found came with its own read: no signal of extra warmth, just a plainer, more neutral tone. The two studies together point to something more specific than “add emoji” or “don’t.” The emoji a person picks appears to function almost like a small, specific statement of intent, separate from the words around it, and mismatching that signal, sending something that reads as sexual in a context meant to feel friendly, or nothing at all in a moment that called for warmth, seems to be where the real cost shows up.
Both studies are honest about their limits, and it’s worth sitting with those rather than skating past them. Gesselman and her colleagues were careful to note their data is correlational: people who use more emoji might simply be more emotionally expressive or socially skilled to begin with, a trait that could independently make them more successful at dating, rather than the emoji themselves doing the work. Their sample was also limited to opposite-relative-stranger contexts; using more emoji with someone a person already knows well didn’t show the same pattern in follow-up findings the researchers described. Rodrigues and colleagues’ study measured how a message was perceived by an outside reader in a controlled experiment, not what actually happened afterward between two real people getting to know each other, and their sample skewed toward a specific set of social platforms that may not generalize to every messaging context.
Put together honestly, what the research supports isn’t a simple emoji-count rule to memorize. It’s a narrower, more useful read: emoji seem to help texting do a job that plain text alone struggles with, signaling warmth, tone, and intent, but only within a fairly tight band. Three or fewer per message keeps that signal legible. Beyond that, or when the specific emoji sent doesn’t match the tone of the moment, the same tool that was building a connection starts working against it instead.