we suck at texting

an essay on mismatched expectations, distance and growing up

This is an essay from my winter zine with a few new edits! Scroll to the bottom to see the layout I designed for it :D

There are some long distance friends I can count on to always text me back and others where I can convince myself I might never hear from ever again. 

Text exchanges with any of these friends can begin out of the blue with a piece of personal news shared or an “I saw this and it made me think of you” moment. From then on, our dialogue unfolds into a lengthy session of catching up. But for the texting stragglers, conversations might lag for days if not weeks as they take their precious time to get back to me (and as I start to mimic this pattern with them too). 

I’m not sensitive! I swear! I know you’re busy and that being in the right headspace is important for you to give the heartfelt response you believe I deserve. But sometimes it can feel like I’m shouting into the dark and I’m left thinking about how we got to the point where it became so easy to defer a response. 

The history of human correspondence is long and contested. A quick search online says the first ever handwritten letter is thought to have been sent in 500 BC by Persian Queen Atossa. Yet as early as 3000 years ago, carrier pigeons flew to destinations with messages of war tied to their legs. 

Letters chart changes across history. In 1527, King Henry VIII penned his love to Anne Boleyn. The letter captured his infatuation which led him to break from the Roman Catholic church in order to divorce his first wife and marry Anne. In 1844, Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker introducing the theory of evolution. In 1963, Martin Luther King wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail on scraps of newspaper, creating one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most quintessential descriptions of systemic racism. 

The Marvelettes pestered Mr. Postman, anxiously awaiting penned replies from a long distance lover. Kafka bemoaned the days he didn’t receive letters from his beloved Milena. In a famous scene from The Notebook, protagonist Allie asks Noah why he never sent her any letters and admits that now it’s “too late.” We have always been nervous about receiving a response. 

The first email was delivered to a digital inbox 1971, mimicking the traditionally mailed letter. Since, digital communication has evolved from recreating penned correspondence to acting as a replacement to in-person conversations. From read receipts to emojis to typing bubbles and signals that indicate if someone is online, instant messaging platforms attempt to close the physical distance we have with the people we’re texting. Now, instant messaging feels closer to a physical conversation than a mailed letter.

So while texting has evolved from asynchronous forms of correspondence, I find myself placing on it the same expectations I have for in-person conversations.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Sherry Turkle said instant messaging puts people in a situation where they can be responded to instantaneously. When that doesn’t happen, she said, people can get anxious. 

“Your brain is not a perfect instrument for processing texts. But it will be interpreted as though it really was a conversation, and so you can hurt people,” said Turkle, the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

But even if I come to terms with the fact that people won’t respond to me like they would if we were in a real-life conversation, does that mean I should give someone all the time in the world to reply? After all, making the effort to reply in good time after someone else made the effort to reach out should be a sign of the human decency necessary for a functioning society. This makes me think about what we owe to each other, but also about what we owe to ourselves. 

One of the biggest reasons my friends tell me they take long to reply is burnout. Decreasing screen time is a rising form of self-care and, whether it be the stress of exams or the overwhelming number of messages in their inbox, the in-depth reply expected from a “how have you been doing?” is easy to put off. When there’s a million other things going on in your life, the tiny dot indicating that I haven’t responded to a message is barely noticeable.

"Our smartphones are always close by, and it's easier than ever to connect with people all over the world – meaning that we’re often messaging people across different time zones. But when we're 'always on' we don't allow ourselves the headspace to switch off properly, which can lead to mental fatigue," Dr. Mark Winwood at AZA PPP healthcare told Cosmopolitan. 

Some of my friends probably don’t even know I’m expecting a faster response, and the norms around texting are so new that the proper etiquette is unclear. I’m a culprit too. I have a handful of my text exchanges that I’ve started to see through the lens of penpalship–while I give friends farther away longer replies, I also take much longer to get back to them. Beyond arbitrary judgements based on distance, closeness and my mood, I have no rational criteria on what it takes for someone to be boxed into the penpal category. This often leads to a miscommunication on expectations.

“New developments in digital technology have outpaced the formulation of mutually agreed new communication paradigms, so when a text is sent, we're not all responding according to the same ‘rules,’” Bryan Lufkin writes for BBC. 

So, how do we navigate self-care while also maintaining relationships?

The resounding conclusion I found from articles about burnout and the crippling expectation of 24/7 availability is to just have a conversation. Talk to your friend, establish boundaries and share expectations. 

I learned about the importance of communicating expectations and reflecting over our own relationship with the medium on a conversation with Emily Balcetis, associate professor of Psychology at New York University. As a social species, Balcetis says we are socially responsible. If we’re feeling neglected by a friend, the best thing to do is pick up the phone or speak in-person to smooth out misunderstandings.

“Most people don’t want to hurt each other. Most people want to have smooth interactions. Most people want to be happy,” Balcetis said. “But it can be hard to realize that something has landed the wrong way because you’re not getting any input from the other person.”

I’ve come to accept that some of my friends are terrible texters (just like me!) and that their inability to reply isn’t a reflection of our relationship. We’ve had the very conversations about texting expectations that Balcetis says are vital, and this has helped me understand that delayed replies aren’t personal attacks. 

I’m starting to let go of the idea that the frequency of interactions you have with a faraway friend doesn’t really indicate closeness. I know I still value my friends and they still value me. Infrequent replies aren’t indications of a bad connection–the love will always be there. Instead, what I’m slowly coming to terms with is the fact that our bad texting is a symptom of the reality that our lives are naturally flowing in opposite directions. Sometimes we must let go of what was to make space for what will be, and sometimes that means my bestest friends might also be the same people I haven’t heard from in months. I think that’s the hardest part to face.