Texting in the dating world has always frustrated and fascinated me. Frustrated, because I don’t always understand what the person is trying to ‘imply’ and then I spend hours trying to decipher it. And that’s just one reason. Fascinated, because texting really did transform the dating game in many ways. In my case, when I mean dating, I’m really talking about Arranged Marriage dating. So now imagine (if you’ve been there, done that, then you won’t need to imagine) trying to decide if a specific boy would make a good husband over text messages. Yes people, the emoji’s you use are a huge deciding factor in the AM world! ( Also, CHECK OUT this cool Emoji Short Film. So creative! )
I’m including some really ‘fascinating’ blurbs from this NYT article on texting anxiety, or more specifically “typing awareness indicator” – the time between text messages. Specifically that little gray bubble with the ellipses that pops up on your iPhone while the person on the other end of your text message is writing a response.
In the particularly high-stakes conversation at hand — it was the bubble that popped up to indicate typing, then disappeared to show he had stopped. Then came back up to show typing, then went away again. Then returned for what seemed like an eternity (he must be writing something deep, right?) only to produce a response so benign (you know, like “cool” or “ya”) that it could only be topped by the humiliation of the bubble never returning at all (meaning he was flat-out ignoring me). Which I would know, of course, because I could see that he had read my message (that’s called a “read receipt”).
“The three dots shown while someone is drafting a message in iMessage is quite possibly the most important source of eternal hope and ultimate letdown in our daily lives,” said Maryam Abolfazli, a writer in Washington who has tackled the topic.
Laura Barganier, a public relations manager in New York, told me recently, “Sometimes I don’t want someone — O.K., likely a boy — to know I’m taking so long to write a text that I start a brand-new blank text and then copy and paste it in the original chain,”
“But don’t you wonder if he wonders how you typed so quickly?” I asked.
“I fake type for a few seconds,” she responded.