I pleaded to know what was so great about this. She sweetly recalled that “he remembered my name, he said hi, and he told me to call him back.”
Never mind the fact that what she described was the content of LITERALLY EVERY VOICE MAIL IN HISTORY. Name, hello, please call back. Not really a boatload of charm on display. To fail this test, a guy would have to leave a message that said: “No greeting. This is a man. I don’t remember you. End communication.”
When you look at overall numbers on communication, you see that we are generally texting more and calling less. According to Nielsen, Americans’ use of phones for voice calls peaked in 2007; we’ve been calling less, and speaking for fewer minutes, ever since.5
This change in communication may have some side effects, though. In her book Alone Together, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle convincingly makes the case that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining.
When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation—kids on the left, parents on the right—a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents’ side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids’ side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them.
It made me wonder whether our ability and desire to interact with strangers is another muscle that risks atrophy in the smartphone world. You don’t need to make small talk with strangers when you can read the Beverly Hills, 90210 Wikipedia page anytime you want. Honestly, what stranger can compete with a video that documents the budding friendship of two baby hippopotamuses? No one, that’s who.
At a minimum, young people are growing anxious about real-time phone conversations with people they don’t know well, and particularly with potential dates. “I have social anxiety, and having to respond or react on the spot to a phone call or in person would make me overanalyze everything and put myself in a tizzy,” one young woman told us. “I would want to take my time and think of a response that is genuine.”
The obvious advantage of a text is that a guy can text someone without having to gather the courage needed for a phone call. If you accept Turkle’s notion that men are also in general getting worse at spontaneous conversation, it makes sense that this trend will continue to climb.
I discussed this change in communication with Turkle in Los Angeles, and she brought up an interesting thought about getting asked out over the phone back in the day. “When a guy called and asked you out back then, it was a very special thing. You felt special and it was very flattering that he gathered the courage to do it.”
When I discussed what I had heard from the interviews with young people today, Turkle said that being asked out through a text message has become so banal that it no longer gives women that sense of flattery. As far as they know, the guy who has sent the message is hitting up lots of women and waiting to see who writes back. Unless he has sent something truly distinctive and personal, a text just isn’t all that meaningful.
After many conversations with women in the single world, I must concur.
THE MODERN BOZO
One firm takeaway from all our interviews with women is that most dudes out there are straight-up bozos. I’ve spent hours talking with women and seeing the kind of “first texts” they get from guys, and trust me, it’s infuriating. These were intelligent, attractive, amazing women and they all deserved better.
Some people say that it doesn’t matter what you text someone. If they like you, they like you. After interviewing hundreds of singles, I can scientifically confirm that this is total bullshit.
For those who doubt me, here is an example from a show I did at the Chicago Theatre in the spring of 2014.
During that tour, after doing material about texting, I would ask if anyone in the audience had recently met someone and had been texting back and forth. If they had, they would come up to the stage and I would pick a few people and read, analyze, and ask them about what was happening in their messages.
At this particular show I was speaking with Rachel, who had met a guy at a good friend’s wedding. As it happened, the guy was also a friend of her sister’s, so he had a pretty good shot at a first date with her. She was single. She was interested. All he had to do was send her a simple message introducing himself and asking her to do something.
Here’s what happened.
He sends his first message: