WHINING & DINING | COLUMN | MATIHIKO | TECH
Written by Elle Daji (she/her) | @ellemnopow | Contributing Columnist
Edited by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor
It could be the most stressful period of your life. Your relationship with your mother is up in flames, you're late on about three deadlines at work, re-wore your last pair of socks three times in a row, and started scheduling coffee with friends twenty working days in advance. And yet, the sixty-three emails from your boss and thirty-item to-do list seem less tangibly impactful than being left on delivered for the past three days.
The ability to access people through technology complicates the already bewildering experience of dating. Pervasive phone use led to the belief that our circle has constant and immediate access to our attention. Texting etiquette, even in platonic relationships, forms an amorphous cloud of ill-defined rules. Through message threads, we lose the context acquired from communicating in person, forced to glean the subtext of someone's communication, not through their tone or expression, but through their punctuation. I have never been more scared of a full stop in my life.
With all this soap-opera-esque turmoil occurring at the tips of our fingers instead of real life, sometimes I need a few reminders to stop my brain from going on overdrive. I despise the game of ensuring a reply is sent a respectable time after receiving a message to portray an air of carelessness. It's all so inauthentic and tiresome. Unfortunately, yes, I grab my ball and play, too.
It's the time someone takes to respond, usually most felt during the first steps of a relationship. Unfamiliar mannerisms and different communication styles are prone to misinterpretation. As someone who is terminally attached to her phone, I struggle when dealing with a love interest that takes days to reply. Jumping to the worst conclusions: they must hate me, and I'm not worth their time. I love to be dramatic.
The girls often congregate around a dinner table to lament the time spent on delivered. The suspense causes our neurons to fire in an insubordinate manner. Making excuses to tranquilise my fears. They might be running a marathon, stuck in a twelve-hour traffic jam, hiking without reception or walking their cat. Common advice from friends includes the phrase no one wants to hear, 'if they wanted to, they would.' And while this is true, I return to my previous point that discerning someone's communication style is difficult to derive after a week of talking. Give it some time; your perspective on their behaviour might change after delving a little deeper.
On the other hand, some people respond rapidly. Which often can be more confusing. Sometimes, it can be easy to mistake prompt responses for something more. My friend Adrian spent endless nights texting someone they had never met in person. They exchanged intimate details about their lives and made extensive plans to meet in person. Exorbitant words of affection caused Adrian to reasonably believe they liked him. Alas, the virtual love affair was over within a fortnight.
You may think I'm cynical, but I call it realistic. People often act out of character with their true feelings. This behaviour may not always be malicious, but it is no less cause for confusion. Throw the six walls of a phone into the mix, and it's even more difficult to tell how much of their online persona is an accurate depiction of themselves. Often, it is not.
Sometimes, though, it's not them; it's you. A friend of mine once successfully asked a man to grab a drink over text, only to later find out through mutual friends he thought it was platonic. While the objective observer could tell what the message meant, he was blind to it. The disparate nature of humans permeates our communication styles, and I find it's useful to keep this in mind when the inevitable overthinking kicks in.
Now, I just spent a lot of words to essentially say, it's not that deep. Texting portrays a minutia of someone's personality; it's better to discover more about them through an in-person connection. So try not to overthink the number of hours since the last message and assess the communication holistically. Taking all interactions into account. You won't always get it correct, but that's all part of the ebb and flow of dating. And if you're on delivered and feel like throwing your phone in the water, à la Ella Yellich O'Connor, dig deep and find some self-control to stop checking your phone. You just picked it up, didn't you? Don't worry, I did too.
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