What to do when she ignores my messages but is online

When you see her active and your message unread, your brain fills in the gap with a story. She saw it and chose not to answer. That story is usually wrong. Most people open an app, get pulled into something else, and leave. Her phone may have been in a bag, she may have been reading the notification without opening the thread, or she may have meant to answer and forgot. The online indicator only tells you the app was open at some point, and that's all it can tell you.

What matters more is the pattern across the whole conversation. If she used to reply within a day and now takes four, that's a change worth noticing. If she's always been slow and short, this is just how she texts. Look at how she handled the last few exchanges, not just the one message you're stuck on. Her energy in the conversation tells you more than the green dot does.

A reply that works in this situation is one she can answer in five seconds without thinking. Think of a single specific question, a small thing she already knows the answer to, or a light reference to something she said earlier. The message should be short enough to read at a glance, and it should not depend on her remembering a long setup. Telling her what you did today or sending a joke about nothing tends to fail, because she has to re-enter the whole conversation to get it.

What the message should leave out is any reference to the delay. Don't mention that she hasn't replied, don't say you were wondering where she went, and don't add a little bit of hurt. Those lines force her to respond to your feelings instead of to the conversation, and that's a harder thing to answer quickly. A message that could have been sent on any normal day works better here than one that acknowledges the silence.

Give the first message a reasonable window before you do anything else. A few hours is too quick to read anything into, and a day is usually enough for a normal reply to show up. If you send a second message, make it clearly lighter than the first and separated by at least another day. If she still doesn't answer after that, the conversation has probably ended for her, even if she never says so.

Don't send a third message just to close the loop or to get a clear answer. A clear answer, in practice, is a silence you can read, and continuing to push only makes it more awkward for both of you. If she comes back later with a normal message, respond at her pace, not with a pile of catch-up. If she doesn't come back, let the thread go and move on. The conversation is over when she stops replying, whether or not she ever explains why.