I told him frankly that he was terrible at texting.
“I know,” he said, hiding mischief in his smile, something I would both fall for and fall out of favor with. “I’ll call you tonight.” Calling? How archaic. He nevertheless did call, and I naturally panicked at verbal communication and let it go to voicemail. I figured I’d let him squirm while he created a monologue and tried to make plans with no one listening or responding on the other end. I let him experience the silence of lost communication, a common feeling I experienced when it took him 48 hours to respond to my time sensitive texts.
From the days where you had to press the “7” key four times to get the letter “s,” to the present where you can have Siri break up with your boo-thang for you, the role of texting and phones has changed dramatically. If you ask my mom, she will tell you I sent enough texts in middle school to cover Verizon’s profits for the next century. If I got a text from a prospective boo-thang, I’d respond faster than you could say “idk, my bff Jill.” This has changed drastically, as I no longer say “idk” or “bff” and I don’t respond in a single beat of my heart.
For lack of a better term, my best friend Grace and I have begun using the phrase “letting it marinate” when we receive a text we don’t want to respond to just yet. Especially with boys who have decided to take their sweet time responding — we’d let that text marinate as long as one would a Thanksgiving turkey. That’s sometimes as long as a couple of days, folks.
It has become harder and harder to navigate through the already challenging and draining world of dating, without having to put limitations on our communication. Many TV shows and boys alike have preached the “three-day rule,” which limits postdate communications to at least three days. I have limited myself to the “three-hour rule,” where after a mere three hours I will excitingly text my date about how well our outing went. My personal rules aside, we have made communication into a balancing act in deciding how quickly to respond to a text. We tiptoe a line between eagerness if we respond too quickly and detachment if we take too long to respond.
The problems I have encountered with past boo-thangs lied in that there was great communication in person and a sparing “haha ok” in text. Being someone who texts more than she’d like to admit, I put a great deal of emphasis on cellular communication, but that leads to disappoint when the receiver does not share the sentiment. This is where communication breaks down.
Texting — or in the case of ex-boo-thangs, not texting — has complicated the world of millennial relationships. When the communication lines get blurred, so do the lines we draw to define our relationships. We should be able to say what we want to say, when we want to say it. If I have a successful date, I’d want the guy to know. If I had a terrible time listening to his ten year plan over runny omelettes, I’d also want him to know. Texting has become another form of communication we can use to be evasive with. Communication between people has diminished greatly — not only are we no longer saying what we mean, we are no longer saying anything at all.
Although I will always prefer face-to-face interaction (trust me, I’m funnier in person than in text), I still recognize the importance of texting. I am proposing a call to action. If you “had a great time” and “would like to see [me] again,” don’t “read and ignore” messages where I try to see you again. I don’t want to throw my phone across the room every time a boy doesn’t respond to my text messages. I would rather take all the time I’ve wasted over waiting for a boy to text me back and spend it doing something useful, like watching dogs at the park or thinking of successful grilled cheese combinations.
I don’t want to have to guess if a guy is interested in me with every “sorry, I fell asleep.” Maybe it’s the writer in me, or maybe it’s my affinity for oversharing, but we should say what we mean. Every text does not have to be a proclamation of love, but it be a response. We should say how we feel. For me, knowing is always better than guessing. For me, the fear of being rejected is less frightening than the fear of being ignored.
Meredith loves telling stories and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the man and comfy NYC apartment. She, however, eats enough brunch to cover all six seasons. When she's not drowning in 16th-century literature, she can be found lamenting over the bad grammar and bad boys in her middle school diary.
Find her on twitter @merewilsh or email her mwilsher@bu.edu with all your love musings or questions.
