Are you still single? Don’t want to be? Here’s your New Year’s resolution: Stop texting.
I’m not an old fuddy-duddy. (Or not that old anyway.) I despise talking on the phone. I don’t have voicemail. I’m a texter all the way. So maybe I’m a hypocrite.
But I can afford to be a hypocrite because I’m not on the dating scene. I can limit all of my conversations with my husband to text (“buy milk,” “Jack is sick”) because there is very little for us to misunderstand and — more important — at the end of the day, we have face-to-face conversations.
Even that can be a danger zone. A 2013 study out of Brigham Young University actually found too much texting even when you’re already in a relationship isn’t healthy, either. Quick “I love you” or scheduling texts are fine, even positive. But any attempt to conduct serious conversations via text quickly leads to “lower relationship quality.”
It’s obvious why. Texting is divorced from tone and can easily lead to misinterpretation. Was that a joke or is my boyfriend a jerk? What does that emoji convey? Texting blurs intent. (Example: Putting a period at the end of a text has become universally interpreted as throwing shade.)
It also blurs whether you have a real connection with someone. Last week, the short story “Cat Person” in The New Yorker inexplicably became immensely popular. In it, a 20-year-old college student named Margot meets 34-year-old Robert and they have a short-lived relationship that culminates in awkward, bad sex. Before the sex, they have exactly one other outing together, and the rest of the time is spent texting.
Writing about “Cat Person” in National Review, Kyle Smith noted that texting allowed Margot to “present a better version of yourself than you really are in the moment. But guess what? Guys get to do that, too. Guys can make themselves look better than they really are. Texting-Robert is cool and funny. In-person Robert is so weird and awkward that you can’t be sure he doesn’t plan to slit your throat.”
That’s the problem with getting to know someone through words typed on a screen. You can’t get a real sense of them. You can’t tell if you’re actually attracted to them, either.
The TV show “Catfish” highlights stories of people who meet and fall in love online, sometimes spending years in relationships had solely on the computer or phone, before finding out that the person isn’t who they thought they were. And while, sure, they were attracted to their words on a screen, finding out that the picture their boyfriend or girlfriend used is fake fizzles the whole thing pretty quickly.
It’s rare that the trickee decides they still love the tricker due to all the great texting conversations they had. Actual, physical, in-person attraction matters. And so does the breach of trust that develops when long-term text-only relationships are revealed to contain myriad distortions.
Restricting the texting you do in the early stages of getting to know someone, then, is just practical. Jackie in Atlanta told me that while she finds texting fun, “it can also quickly become a distraction.” She limits her texting to “weed out guys who crave constant attention and engagement from afar, without ever getting emotionally intimate in person.”
It’s not just women catching on to the time-wasting aspect of texting. Jay in New York says he uses “fun texts to initiate conversation but then switches to logistics” of when to meet.
Dating coach Diana Mandell discourages early texting among her clients. She told me “texting to communicate while developing a relationship will most likely cause unnecessary problems with meaning, tone and emotion getting completely lost.”
Is it possible to fall in love over text or e-mail, then meet and have all of your feelings confirmed? Of course. We all have friends who have done this. But we all also have plenty of friends who will spend weeks or months texting before meeting — and sometimes end up not meeting at all. Too often people will meet the person with whom they have texting chemistry only to find out they have no in-person chemistry.
It’s hard to be the weirdo demanding phone conversation while everyone around you is texting up a storm, but you’ll save yourself a ton of wasted time if you make that leap. Institute a policy for yourself where you can text for half an hour to see if there’s any connection and then switch to setting up an in-person date. Find love in 2018, get off your phone.