Just Leave a Message

When I was in junior high, the most prevalent form of male/femal communication was the note. If you had a crush, issue or just wanted to vent, you wrote a note, folded it about 42 times and passed it on a journey across the classroom. If the teacher saw this, sometimes you had to read it in front of the class. This could be really embarrassing, especially if you had bared your soul. If the note actually made it to it's intended reader, it had usually been read along the way, so now everyone knew the news. Of course some people would write in big block letters "Do Not Read", and this would insure that the note would never make it to it's recipient because everyone had to read it. After class, there would be about 10 notes scattered about on the floor.

Fast forward to highschool, and the preferred communicae became the phone. Not the cell phone, just the home phone. This meant that your life became very limited if you were hoping for or expecting a call. Not like these days where everyone can be reached anywhere at anytime on their cell. Back then, you had to hang out and wait. If someone hinted that the guy you had been crushing on for 4 years was thinking of giving you a call, then there was no way you were leaving the house for even 2 minutes. If mom sent you out to take the trash to the curb, you were sprinting for fear the phone would ring and you would miss it, or dad would answer and ask "who's calling please?" (mortification)

By college, there were cell phones. This freed us up a bit. No more having to wait, because you were available 24/7 to find out who wanted to go out with you. The down side was that you were also available 24/7 to find out who wanted to break up with you.

A few years later, when computers became a household item, e-mail became the easy way out. Now you could communicate without even opening your mouth. Those 3 little words, "You've Got Mail" became the equivalent of seeing the red message light being lit up on your phone, or the missed calls flashing on your cell. E-mail ushered in a new form of etiquette. What use to take weeks to discover about a person now only took days. Of course, there were drawbacks. Some of the mystery was gone. There is always a danger when we are given the ability to react instantaneously instead of mulling over things for awhile. And from a sexist point of view, the male/female dynamic changed a little bit. Women were able to (good or bad) to say things on line that they would probably never say in person. The 24 hour rule was created, where you promised yourself that you would wait that amount of time before sending anything of consequence. Unfortunately, being the emotional creatures that women sometimes are, this rule was often broken. Many hours were spent trying to figure out how to "take back" something that had been written at 2:00 in the morning after a long day.

But now the e-mail is a little outdated. Why e-mail when you can actually text and get an immediated response? I have known people (being careful not to mention my daughters) who have carried on relationships totally by text. Sample converstation:
"Did he text you today?"
"only once...said he was really busy at work."
"Oh, I am so sorry. You better move on."
What?? Is there some sort of numerical code that tells us how many text messages equal a relationship now? Some kind of formula that you can work out to tell you if he likes you?

A friend told me the other day that she was very offended by the tone of her husband's text. I asked her how on earth she could infer any sort of tone from text? "Trust me, you just know."

If you don't text, you are treated with a certain amount of disdain by those that do. But I just cannot take the leap at his point. "How can we reach you?" people will ask. You know what? Sometimes I don't want to be reached. Sometimes I still want to be able to control how and when I answer someone. When my husband is angry with me, he doesn't take my calls. I can respect that. (I can also leave 546 messages to annoy him) Everyone needs to be able to throw up the "wall" sometimes.

An article in the Wall street Journal a few days ago detailed how a man in the 1940's who wanted to ask someone out literally had to hike down to a pay phone, call a friend, ask the friend to relay the message...and then wait several weeks for a similar response. Can you imagine? How lovely to be able to re-tell that story.

I'm just not convinced that a texted "want to hang out"..."sure" ...can ever compete with that.