However, the mistakes people make are not always so egregious. We repeatedly found that one text can change the whole dynamic of a budding relationship. In a certain context, even just saying something as innocuous as “Hey, let’s hang out sometime” or spelling errors or punctuation choices can irritate someone. When I spoke with Sherry Turkle about this, she said that texting, unlike an in-person conversation, is not a forgiving medium for mistakes.
In a face-to-face conversation, people can read each other’s body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice. If you say something wrong, you have cues to sense it and you have a moment to recover or rephrase before it makes a lasting impact. Even on the phone you can hear a change in someone’s voice or a pause to let you know how they are interpreting what you’ve said. In text, your mistake just sits there marinating on the other person’s screen, leaving a lasting record of your ineptitude and bozoness.
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The fact that your interactions on your phone can have such a profound effect on people’s impression of you as a person makes it clear that you basically have two selves now—your real-world self and your phone self.
The phone self is defined by whatever it is you communicate onto the other person’s screen. I interviewed many women who told me that they didn’t always have sharp memories of guys to whom they gave their numbers after a conversation in a bar or over drinks at a party. In that context, the first message they get can be a huge factor in whether they reach back, and the phone self that’s presented makes all the difference. As you saw with the example with Rachel, even small tweaks of a text message can make the difference between being perceived as nice or mean, smart or dumb, funny or boring.
In our interviews and focus groups, people in all parts of the world generously opened up the secret world in their phones. I’ve probably scrolled through more text message conversations than anyone and asked men and women what we all are wondering: What was going on in your head when you read/wrote that? What did you think of this guy/girl when you read this message? It was so fascinating to see how people’s words could evoke such a wide range of reactions.
Let’s first look at the things that irritated people the most.
THE GENERIC “HEY” TEXT
After seeing hundreds and hundreds of messages in women’s phones, I can definitively say that most of the texts women receive are, sadly, utterly lacking in either thought or personality. Want to know what’s filling up the phones of nearly every single woman? It’s this: “Hey,” “Hey!” Heyyy!!” “Hey what’s going?” “Wsup,” “Wsup!” “What’s going on?” “Whatcha up to?”
It seems like a harmless message to send, and I’ve surely sent a good number of them in my own dating life. I and all the others who have sent similar messages surely meant no offense. However, seeing it from the other side is eye-opening. When your phone is filled with that stuff, generic messages come off as super dull and lazy. They make the recipient feel like she’s not very special or important to you.
Oh, and in case you’re a dude and you’ve never seen what your “Hey” texts look like when you send them, serially, here’s another post from Straight White Boys Texting:
THE SECRETARY PROBLEM
Another irritating situation that plagues both men and women is the endless texting banter that never leads to a meet in the real world. So many people trying to make a connection wind up spending so much time typing and typing and trying to schedule things that eventually whatever spark may have been there diminishes. At our focus groups we heard countless variations of an interaction that goes something like this:
Four days later.
Nine days later.
Six days later.
At this point the conversation ends. It’s amazing to see this exchange go from its fun and flirtatious opening to just plain fizzling out. And you can see how it happens: They go from enjoying the banter to trying to schedule something concrete, and all of a sudden they’re acting like secretaries.
The other annoying thing about this scheduling banter is that both parties are sometimes left wondering whether the person is actually busy or pretending to be busy, leading to more confusion and frustration. When you’re involved in this kind of back-and-forth, it’s hard not to wonder whether the other person even has interest.
THE ENDLESS BACK-AND-FORTH
Scheduling chatter is merely one of the many forms of useless banter that makes dating in the digital age so frustrating, especially for women over twenty-five, since they have less patience for constant text exchanges. Another form, which is especially common among the younger gentlemen out there, emerges when a dude is just too shy to actually ask the other person to do something. Instead of negotiating times and places, they wind up exchanging meaningless texts ad nauseam.