It's Friday afternoon and I hear a familiar beep in my purse. I open my phone to a glowing message.
"Hey what r u up to?" Sigh. I guess we're doing this again.
Ever since phone calls replaced love letters, women only had to worry about one thing: Will he call or won't he? These days, this concern is exacerbated by even more ways for your sweetie to either snare or snub you electronically.
The old-fashioned phone call now shares the spotlight with a host of other options for technological foreplay: Facebook messages and wall posts, instant messages and, foremost among them, text messages. (We won't include Facebook pokes, as they're for 13-year-olds and perverts.) As they've evolved, each one has been loosely ranked on a scorecard of affection, leading everyone in the dating game to wonder how many points they still need in order to get to the next level.
Girls' Night Out conversations are filled with breaks to thumb-type furiously and fret about the intentions of someone who has yet to communicate via voice. "If he doesn't call, but he texts and IMs, is that just as good?" "How many texts equal a phone call?" "I got a wall post saying he's free tonight, but it's been two hours since I texted him back, so I think he's sleeping with someone else." And because no one ever texts, "My intentions are that we continue seeing each other regularly for an extended period of time" but rather, "Ur 2 cute. C u at 9 k? xx!" the ambiguities never quite get resolved.
I was formerly completely anti-text message and would use them for strictly utilitarian purposes, such as to let someone know to meet me at TDR, or that the bus had hit a hobo and therefore, I would be another hour late. I had the type of text plan where you pay 20 cents per text sent or received, and I would berate my friends for sending me non-necessary texts. I finally cracked and upgraded to a more generous plan when I began seeing a guy who liked to send about 10 or 20 texts throughout the day, each bearing nothing but a semicolon and closed parenthesis, every time we had a date. Obviously, neither telling him to stop nor suffering a $150 phone bill were viable alternatives.
What's baffling is that behavior like that of Emoticon Man is increasingly thought of as a viable alternative to actual contact. Text messaging has been around for a gazillion technology years, but its use has expanded from a quick-update mechanism to a legitimate form of interpersonal communication.
Under the guise of "saving time," we've adapted technology to make us look as breezy and busy as possible, waiting hours before responding to texts or abbreviating five-letter words for that "I'm so busy and important" effect. We spend 20 minutes thumb-typing a message that could be said in 20 seconds, crafting newer, sexier sign-offs.
What's more, there's a somewhat scary permanency to it all. Technology allows us to accurately ascertain, with friends gathered around a glowing iPhone screen, "What did he mean by that?" without accidentally remembering it incorrectly. It can document exactly what you said in that fateful 160-character precursor to the breakup. There are no take-backs in e-flirting.
In short, technology has streamlined dating communication to its barest essentials. With it, we are able to project quick, impersonal glimpses of our most perfectly crafted selves, saving time, effort and daytime minutes. Unfortunately, we also lose the stutters, the awkward silences, the thoughtful pauses and all of the other beautiful imperfections of old-fashioned conversation. Instead, we lie in wait, cells in hand, hoping for a witty, carefree, abbreviated comment to beep through from across the electronic abyss so that we can wonder what it signifies. In the end, it only adds obstacles to a game that was complicated enough to begin with.
Olga Khazan is a senior in the School of Public Affairs and a social commentary columnist for The Eagle.
