Seeking clarification on messaging mechanics pre/post friend request

Apologies for the stupid title, battling the anxiety a bit at the moment.

So the other day the pigs actually flew, and hell actually froze over - I talked to a girl....in real life no less.

Anyway....we chatted for a bit, she seemed to be enjoying herself. I asked to keep in touch (she was working so I thought it best to bail). She sent a friend req to herself from my phone.

That night, before she'd accepted it, I sent her a photo of something we had been talking about. The next day she accepted the friend req so I waited for a reply. Message wasn't read so I checked with AI (the chain of mistakes continues!) only to have CoPilot and Gemini contradict each other regarding the behaviour of messages before and after a friend req has been accepted.

As a result I sent another message after she accepted the req hoping that would redirect the chat to her inbox. It's cool if she hasn't gotten around to reading it, but what's not cool is having no idea where the chat actually is. My incessant anxiety is hammering into me that it got routed to the SPAM folder (there's nothing for FB to make even a tenuous connection between us to justify sending the first message to her inbox).

I'm just a bit frustrated at the possibility that I screwed up connecting with someone by not being patient and waiting for her to accept the friend req. Yeah I know, I'm a head case..... *shrug*

Clarification on how Messenger handles this scenario would help end my anxious suffering! Thanks everyone 😄