MIT anthropologist Natasha Schüll studies gambling addiction and specifically what happens to the minds and bodies of people who get hooked on the immediate gratification that slot machines provide. When we met in Boston, she explained that unlike cards, horse races, or the weekly lottery—all games that make gamblers wait (for their turn, for the horses to finish, or for the weekly drawing)—machine gambling is lightning fast, so that players get immediate information.
“You come to expect an instant outcome, and you stop tolerating any delay.” Schüll drew an analogy between slot machines and texting, since both generate the expectation of a quick reply. “When you’re texting with someone you’re attracted to, someone you don’t really know yet, it’s like playing a slot machine: There’s a lot of uncertainty, anticipation, and anxiety. Your whole system is primed to receive a message back. You want it—you need it—right away, and if it doesn’t come, your whole system is like, ‘Aaaaah!’ You don’t know what to do with the lack of response, the unresolved outcome.”
Schüll said that texting someone is very different from leaving a message on a home answering machine, which we used to do in the days before smartphones. “Timewise, and also emotionally, leaving a message on someone’s machine was more like buying a lottery ticket,” she explained. “You knew there would be a longer waiting period until you found out the winning numbers. You weren’t expecting an instant callback and you could even enjoy that suspense, because you knew it would take a few days. But with texting, if you don’t hear back in even fifteen minutes, you can freak out.”
Schüll told us that she has experienced this waiting distress firsthand. Several years ago she was texting with a suitor, someone she’d starting dating and was really into, and he gave every indication that he was really into her too. Then, out of nowhere, the guy went silent. She didn’t hear back from him for three days. She got fixated on the guy’s disappearance and had trouble focusing or even participating in ordinary social life. “No one wanted to hang out with me,” she said, “because I was just obsessed, like, What the fuck? Where the fuck is this guy?”
Eventually the guy reached out and she was relieved to find out that he’d actually legitimately lost his phone, and since that’s where he’d stored her number, he had no other way of getting in touch with her.
“With a phone call, three days of silence probably wouldn’t drive you that crazy, but with my mind habituated to texting, the loss of that reward . . . Well, it was three days of pure hell,” she said.
Even people in relationships experience this anxiety with texting. In my own relationship, which is a committed, loving partnership, I’ve experienced several instances of a delay in text causing uneasiness. Here’s an example:
Note the twenty-minute gap here.
In the gap after “Want to meet us?” I was sure she was mad about something. Her responses had been pretty immediate, and it seemed like her pause was an indicator that something was wrong and that I should have been going to the hotel or something.
Note the time gap here as well.
Again, when she didn’t respond after “Is that a grump txt or not” I was certain she was grumpy, because why wait so long to tell me she’s not grumps? All of this change in my perception of her feelings and my own mood was purely because of the temporal differences in texting.
Even in nonromantic situations, waiting has caused uneasiness. I texted an acquaintance about reading a draft of this very book. I wrote: “Hey would you have any interest in reading an early draft of my modern romance book? Just want to get some eyes on it and I feel like you’d get the tone I’m going for and have good feedback. If you’re too busy etc, no offense taken.”
The text was sent at 1:33 P.M. on a Wednesday and got an immediate “Read 1:33 P.M.” But I didn’t hear back until 6:14 P.M. the next day. During the time that passed, I worried that maybe I’d overstepped my bounds in our friendship, that it wasn’t proper for me to ask, etc. In the end I’d worried for nothing and he wrote back, “yeah, of course! sounds like fun . . .”
If the effect is this powerful for people in committed relationships and friendships, it makes sense that all the psychological principles seem to point to waiting being a strategy that works for singles who are trying to build attraction.