Wait as long as they waited. Wait twice as long. Never answer inside 5 minutes.
These are all the same idea, and the other person can usually feel it.
Free to try. We never store your chats.
It is legible. Somebody who always answers in 2 minutes and then takes 6 hours has said something.
It is rarely the thing they meant to say.
When you are angry. When the message deserves more than the 40 seconds you have. When you genuinely do not know the answer yet.
Those are reasons. "It hasn't been long enough" is not a reason.
Not while you are upset. Not so late that the answer is stale.
Everything in between is fine, and nobody is holding a stopwatch except you.
If you have replied instantly for months and got slow answers back the whole time, the issue is not the timing of 1 message.
It is worth naming out loud, once.
It gives 1 of 4 answers on timing — send now, wait a bit, hold off today, or this has been said enough — and it decides that from this conversation rather than from a rule.
Then it writes the message either way.
Try it on your conversation