Modern Romance (7 page)

These two guys could have the same intentions and feelings in their hearts, but the girl they’re texting will never know that. She’s going to decide whom to go out with based in part on how she interprets the short little messages that pop up on her phone. The lack of specificity in “Wanna do something sometime next week?” is a huge negative to women. The people interviewed overwhelmingly preferred to have a very specific (and ideally interesting and fun) thing presented with a firm invitation.

SOME CALLBACK TO THE LAST PREVIOUS IN-PERSON INTERACTION

This proves you were truly engaged when you last hung out and seemed to go a long way with women.
One guy remembered that a girl was moving and in his text said, “I hope your move went well.” The woman we interviewed brought this up and said it had happened
years
ago but she still remembered it.

Another gentleman shared a story on the subreddit where he met a girl at a bar and they talked for a while and at some point he brought up the band Broken Bells and recommended she check it out. The next morning he received a text saying, “I think October is my favorite song on the Broken Bells album.” “October” was also
his
favorite song on the album. “Not only did she listen to my recommendation, but we connected in a very strong way. That was the beginning of the conversation, and we’ve been talking since,” he said.

There was also this story from a young woman: “One time, I met a guy at a party. When I got home, he texted me, ‘good night little Audrey.’ That’s not my name. I figured he was just too drunk to remember. After I confronted him about this, he said that he called me Audrey because I told him that I looked up to Audrey Hepburn. It was actually pretty sweet.”

I hope you aren’t holding an ice cream cone against your chest, ’cause your heart just warmed—and your ice cream just melted.

A HUMOROUS TONE

This is dangerous territory because some dudes go too far or make a crude joke that doesn
’t sit well, but ideally you both share the same sense of humor and you can put some thought into it and pull it off.
And when it’s pulled off well, the attraction to a similar sense of humor can be quite strong.

Here’s a story from the subreddit: “I met her at a bar in town, 2–3 AM after getting her number I drunkenly text her, ‘I’m that tall guy you made out with.’ In the morning I woke up to a message that said, ‘which tall guy?’ I was incredibly impressed with her sense of humor and we’re still together 2.5 years later.”

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING . . .

So this is what I’ve learned about initial asks, but that’s just the beginning.
Even if you put out a solid ask, you are subject to a mountain of confusion. The person could be busy—or are they just pretending to be busy? They could give you silence, like I got! The adventure is just starting. Since everyone now has an entire social world in their phone, they’re carrying around a device that’s loaded with all kinds of back-and-forth, drama, and romance. Navigating that world is interesting, and what happens when you explore someone else’s phone world is nuts.

AFTER THE ASK . . .

So you’ve fired off a successful
text, or maybe you’ve just received one.
If you are one of the growing number of people evaluating and making plans with potential romantic partners via text messages, the games are just beginning. Unlike phone calls, which bind two people in real-time conversations that require at least some shared interpretation of the situation, communication by text has no predetermined temporal sequencing and lots of room for ambiguity. Did I just use the phrase “predetermined temporal sequencing”?
Fuck yeah, I did
.

In one of our first focus groups, a young woman, Margaret, told us about a gentleman she’d met at work. He sounded charming and she was definitely interested in him. I asked to see her text exchanges and immediately noticed that his name, according to her iPhone, was “Greg DON’T TXT TIL THURSDAY.”

So it was clear why these texts were important. These early communications could be the determining factor in whether she would one day become Margaret DON’T TXT TIL THURSDAY and make a family of little DON’T TXT TIL THURSDAYs of their own.

Margaret later explained that the last name she gave this guy was
not
his name but, in fact, an extreme step she was taking to avoid sending this dude a message for a few days, so as not to seem too eager and to ultimately make herself more desirable. The fear of coming off as desperate or overeager through texting was a common concern in our focus groups, and almost everyone seemed to have some strategy to avoid this deadly pitfall. There is no official guidebook anywhere on texting yet, but a cultural consensus has slowly formed in regard to texts. Some basic rules:

•
Don’t text back right away. You come off like a loser who has nothing going on.

•
If you write to someone, don’t text them again until you hear from them.

•
The amount of text you write should be of a similar length to what the other person has written to you.

•
Carrying this through, if your messages are in blue and the other person’s messages are green, if there is a shit ton more blue than green in your conversation, this person doesn’t give a shit about you.

•
The person who receives the last message in a convo WINS!
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THE SCIENCE OF WAITING

The one area where there was much more debate was the amount of time one should wait to text back.
Depending on the parties involved, it can become a very complicated and admittedly somewhat silly game with many different viewpoints on how to play—and win. As one woman told us, “There is this desire, for me at least, to have the upper hand. I have to have it. So if I text someone, and they wait ten minutes to text me back, I wait twenty. Which sounds stupid, but the way I see it, he and I both know the other is glued to their phone. Everyone is. So if you’re gonna play the game, that’s fine, but I’ll play it better. Very competitive.”

DAMN.

Several people subscribed to the notion of doubling the response time. (They write back in five minutes, you wait ten, etc.) This way you achieve the upper hand and constantly seem busier and less available than your counterpart. Others thought waiting just a few minutes was enough to prove you had something important in your life besides your phone. Some thought you should double but occasionally throw in a quick response to not seem so regimented (nothing too long, though!). Some people swore by waiting 1.25 times longer. Others argued they found three minutes to be just right. There were also those who were so fed up with the games that they thought receiving timely responses free of games was refreshing and showed confidence.

But does this stuff work? Why do so many people do it? Are any of these strategies really lining up with actual psychological findings?

These notions about waiting and playing hard to get have been around for ages. According to Greek historian Xenophon, a prostitute once went to Socrates
*
for advice and he told her: “You must prompt them by behaving as a model of propriety, by a show of reluctance to yield, and by holding back until they are as keen as can be; for then the same gifts are much more to the recipient than when they are offered before they are desired.” Conversely, Socrates knew that people tend to discount and sometimes even reject the things that are always available.

I personally find the idea that this stuff works very frustrating. If someone is really into me and showing interest, shouldn’t I just appreciate that and welcome those advances? Why do we want what we can’t have and sometimes have more attraction to people when they seem a little distant or disinterested?

THE POWER OF WAITING

In recent years behavioral scientists have shed some light on why these waiting techniques can be powerful.
Let’s first look at the notion that texting back right away makes you less appealing. Psychologists have conducted hundreds of studies in which they reward lab animals in different ways under different conditions. One of the most intriguing findings is that “reward uncertainty”—in which, for instance, animals cannot predict whether pushing a lever will get them food—can dramatically increase their interest in getting a reward, while also enhancing their dopamine levels so that they basically feel coked up.
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If a text back from someone is considered a “reward,” consider the fact that lab animals who get rewarded for pushing a lever every time will eventually
slow down
because they know that the next time they want a reward, it will be waiting for them. So basically, if you are the guy or girl who texts back immediately, you are taken for granted and ultimately lower your value as a reward. As a result, the person doesn’t feel as much of an urge to text you or, in the case of the lab animal, push the lever.

 • • • 

Texting is a medium that conditions our minds in a distinctive way, and we expect our exchanges to work differently with messages than they did with phone calls.
Before everyone had a cell phone, people could usually wait awhile—up to a few days, even—to call back before reaching the point where the other person would get concerned. Texting has habituated us to receiving a much quicker response. From our interviews, this time frame varies from person to person, but it can be anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to even immediately, depending on the previous communication. When we don’t get the quick response, our mind freaks out.

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.