A slow reply isn’t always a verdict. Sometimes people are just living.

Other people’s silence gets read as being about you, because you are the one sitting in it. The likelier story is a dead battery, a shift, a bad day, a message opened while walking and forgotten completely. Very few slow replies are decisions. Almost all of them are somebody else’s ordinary life running on its own schedule.

Give it a day before you assign a meaning to it. If something genuinely needs an answer, send a second message that is friendly rather than pointed. And notice how often you are the slow one without meaning anything by it.