Two things to note here. First, the drop in phone calls as a preferred method when you change age groups (52 percent to 23 percent) is stark. Among teenagers the percentage who use text messaging is even higher. In a 2012 textPlus survey, 58 percent of Americans between ages thirteen and seventeen said they’d ask someone out with a text message.1 It’s clear that younger people, who are growing up in a more text-heavy culture, are much more comfortable living their romantic lives via text.
Second, over time, so are all of us.
In 2010 only 10 percent of young adults used texts to ask someone out for the first time, compared with 32 percent in 2013. Asking out someone via text is on course to be the new norm: The phone call is quickly being phased out.
It’s worth pausing here to note that this is an insanely fast transformation in how we communicate. For many generations young people used telephone calls to reach out to possible romantic partners. It was a harrowing experience that we all could relate to. Before the initial ask, you would hear terrifying rings and then an answer. It could be the object of your desire or a roommate or even a parent. At that point you would ask to speak with the person you wanted to ask out.
If they were around, the person would finally say, “Hello,” and a mild panic would ensue. You would have to spend some time chatting them up, trying to form a bond while also setting things up for a possibly awkward segue into a date ask.
“Hey, so yeah, anyway, I lost the pie-eating contest . . . You wanna see a movie sometime?”
This phone-call ask required some bravery to initiate and some skills to execute properly, but over time you’d get better at it and you would strategize these calls.
Let’s say you were a young man named Darren. At first, your calls might be something like this:
DARREN: Hey, Stephanie. It’s me . . . Darren.
STEPHANIE: Hey, Darren, how are you?
DARREN: I’m good.
DARREN: [long pause]
DARREN: Okay . . . Bye.
But soon you’d get better. With time, you’d realize how to be confident on these kinds of calls. You’d have a funny anecdote or conversation piece ready. Witty banter would be at the tip of your tongue, and soon you and Stephanie would be two verbal fencers parrying and riposting it up like this:
DARREN: Hey, Stephanie. It’s me, Darren! [confident, energetic]
WOMAN: Hey, Darren. This is Stephanie’s mom. One second . . .
DARREN: Shit. [quiet]
DARREN: You got this, Darren. You got this. [quiet]
STEPHANIE: Hello?
DARREN: Hey, Stephanie. It’s me, Darren! [back to confident, energetic]
STEPHANIE: Oh, hey, Darren. What’s up?
DARREN: I just got an umbrella!
STEPHANIE: Cool . . .
DARREN: All right, bye!
? ? ?
Well. You’d get better than that.
The skill that went into making a phone call to a romantic interest is one that younger generations may never need or want to build.
As our technology becomes more prevalent in our lives, romantic behavior that seems strange or inappropriate to one generation can become the norm for people in the next one.
For instance, in a recent survey 67 percent of teens said they’d accept an invitation to prom by text.2 For older generations the idea of getting invited to something as special as prom by a text message may sound cold and impersonal. It seems inappropriate for the occasion. But younger folks live in a text-heavy environment and this shapes their perception of what is appropriate. For example, in a topic we’ll revisit in more depth later, breaking up with someone via text seems pretty brutal to people of my generation, but when we interviewed younger people, several said their breakups happened exclusively by text. For younger generations, who knows what texts lie ahead?
THE RISE OF THE TEXT MESSAGE
Texting, otherwise known as Short Message Service (SMS), was thought up by Friedhelm Hillebrand, a German engineer, in 1984 and achieved for the first time by Neil Papworth, a young British engineer who messaged his friend “Merry Christmas” in 1992. Alas, his friend didn’t reply, because his mobile phone didn’t allow him to input text.3
Sure it didn’t. That’s the same shit I hear from friends who don’t respond to my mass “Merry Christmas” text. I even throw in a custom image every year; peep this one from 2012.