It’s 10:30 pm on a school night.
The calc homework that you should be finishing sits idle on your desk as you instead calculate the minutes passed since the last message.
You smile as your phone lights up.
You’ve received a text.
The deep conversation that you’d been having all night comes to a close as he wishes you a good night.
In second hour the next day, all the magic is gone. The face to face conversation is forced. Or, as you later tell your friends,
“Awkward.”
For three weeks of constant texting, you two sure don’t seem to have a lot in common.
When the “thing” ends, you come up with all sorts of reasons why it didn’t work out.
He didn’t really like you.
He wasn’t ready for a relationship.
It wasn’t real.
Instead of hoping to see him in the hallway, you pretend to be checking your phone when he walks by.
How ironic.
But let’s be real here.
The real reason the relationship went nowhere is because you never really got to know each other.
The true tragedy about texting becoming communication lies in the depth of our relationships.
According to my parents, back in the day, people spoke on the “one phone in the house — and it was on a cord, too. Couldn’t leave the kitchen.”
Conversation took place, and the relationship began to develop right from the start.
When I’m talking to a friend and she tells me she and a guy are “talking a lot,” I assume that by “talking” she means “constant text-fest.”
Talking that used to mean actual speech is now made up of formulating witty texts.
Or not so witty. “Lol” and “c u l8r” never really did it for me.
The only thing a texting relationship gets you is awkward situations — and no closer to a new relationship status on Facebook.
There are problems with the new texting culture — as adults everywhere are far too eager to remind us. But if we realize the flaws in communicating only through messages of 160 characters or less and learn to communicate beyond that, there’s no harm done.
Text Mavis or Mary or Martin or Jed — just make sure that your relationship transcends the world of Sprint or Verizon.
The calc homework that you should be finishing sits idle on your desk as you instead calculate the minutes passed since the last message.
You smile as your phone lights up.
You’ve received a text.
The deep conversation that you’d been having all night comes to a close as he wishes you a good night.
In second hour the next day, all the magic is gone. The face to face conversation is forced. Or, as you later tell your friends,
“Awkward.”
For three weeks of constant texting, you two sure don’t seem to have a lot in common.
When the “thing” ends, you come up with all sorts of reasons why it didn’t work out.
He didn’t really like you.
He wasn’t ready for a relationship.
It wasn’t real.
Instead of hoping to see him in the hallway, you pretend to be checking your phone when he walks by.
How ironic.
But let’s be real here.
The real reason the relationship went nowhere is because you never really got to know each other.
The true tragedy about texting becoming communication lies in the depth of our relationships.
According to my parents, back in the day, people spoke on the “one phone in the house — and it was on a cord, too. Couldn’t leave the kitchen.”
Conversation took place, and the relationship began to develop right from the start.
When I’m talking to a friend and she tells me she and a guy are “talking a lot,” I assume that by “talking” she means “constant text-fest.”
Talking that used to mean actual speech is now made up of formulating witty texts.
Or not so witty. “Lol” and “c u l8r” never really did it for me.
The only thing a texting relationship gets you is awkward situations — and no closer to a new relationship status on Facebook.
There are problems with the new texting culture — as adults everywhere are far too eager to remind us. But if we realize the flaws in communicating only through messages of 160 characters or less and learn to communicate beyond that, there’s no harm done.
Text Mavis or Mary or Martin or Jed — just make sure that your relationship transcends the world of Sprint or Verizon.
