Everybody wants less screen time, nobody wants to be left on read

an examination of Bad Texters

I am not a very good texter and as a consequence I frequently hurt people’s feelings. It’s terrible. “I used to think you hated me,” is something I’ve heard more than once. Sometimes the subtext is but now I realise you just don’t like texting, and sometimes the subtext is occasionally, I think you hate me still.

I don’t need to explain why I’m bad at texting. Every Bad Texter’s reasons are the same. It’s not so much about not having enough time, but about being so overwhelmed by the volume of communication radiating from your phone that it becomes the Mr Burns disease door from The Simpsons. So many things are trying to push through at once that nothing at all gets addressed.

I don’t think my brain is advanced enough to form a hierarchy between an email from my agent, a text from my mum, a DM from a stranger and seven thousand requests to leave a five star review for every product or service I have ever enjoyed. I also don’t think I have ADHD or anything. I just think expectations have become unreasonable. “I am normal!” I just yelled at Ella, normally. “THIS is the thing that is not normal!”

You agree with me. I know you agree with me! You feel it, too! You hate it, as well! And yet, in three months, we will be sitting opposite one another in Polpo and you will say: I thought you were mad at me, there. Then, a month later, someone will say to you, in a different Polpo: I thought you hated me, for a while. At some point in the next 12 months I will also wonder if I am despised by someone, then bring it up with them at dinner. Everyone will be horrified. We will all put our hands to our chests, genuinely devastated to have caused psychic stress for our friend. We will each resolve to do better.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do better. I’m bad at texting and I don’t want to be good at it. I hate my phone, and so do you. I feel vulgar and sick when I spend too much time on it, and inevitably, texting takes time. But equally, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, particularly the feelings of people I genuinely care about.

This shouldn’t be a problem, and yet it is.

Because while everyone I know is trying to cut down on their screen time – buying lockboxes, downloading specialty apps, leaving their phone in other rooms while they sleep or read a book – nobody wants to be left on read. And when we’re left on read, it feels very close to being thrown out of the nest. We fail to text others back and we see it as morally neutral behaviour; but when others do the same to us, it creates sincere panic.

We have all learned, for whatever reason, that communication equals intimacy. Even though some of my closest friendships operate on a one-text-chat-a-month basis (and usually, to figure out when we’re next hanging out) we still believe that messages are the greatest proof of our love. The greater the volume of communication, the more intimate two people must be. Which is true, to an extent. Even as a self-described Bad Texter, I still have three or four people who hear from me most days. I’d wager the same is true for you, even if you are also a Bad Texter.

So communication = intimacy, or at least it’s a sign of it. So therefore no communication = no intimacy? That seems to be the conclusion we’re all drawing, alone with our phones. No intimacy = you hate me/we’re in a fight?

Your Bad Texter friend leaves you on read. You look online and your Bad Texter friend doesn’t look sick or busy. They’re at a restaurant with some other friend. They’re posting their White Lotus takes. They’re posting, using their phone, the very same phone you used to ask them what they were doing for lunch on May 10th, and they’re choosing not to reply. The only answer the data can show us is that they hate you, and you’re in a fight.

I’m sticking up for the Bad Texters here, even though I know our behaviour is in many ways inexcusable. Just tell me if you’re free on May 10th you dumb slut!

The only thing I can say in our defence is that (assuming my psychology is the same as most other Bad Texters) to me, posting online is like squeezing a spot, or throwing up a flare from a desert island. I don’t really want to have a conversation. It’s the tension release that comes from reconfirming your own physical existence, which is weird, because you’re doing it in a digital way. It’s a strange combination of I exist! but also no one fucking talk to me, ok!, and I don’t really understand it except it’s how I’ve been behaving for 20 years and therefore must be authentic to something.

I can’t fully explain the paradoxes of a Bad Texter but what I can tell you is that we are not in a fight. Unless you’re mad at me, about the texting thing, which sucks because I predict there will be little change on that front. But let’s not think about those right now. I’m more interested in this idea of expectation.

There was an idea, in the 1950s, that the boom in home electronics like vacuum cleaners would result in more free time for women. That didn’t happen. What happened instead was that the standard of cleanliness kept rising. Previously, floors were supposed to be swept of crumbs and dirt; now they were supposed to shine. I’d argue that something similar is happening with text communication and our intimate lives. In a previous era, letters and phone calls were what sustained a relationship, with the understanding that both these things were expensive and time consuming. On some level, we simply had to believe that our friend kept on loving us even if we didn’t hear from them.

I spoke to my friend Ella about this just now, who is researching this exact topic for her forthcoming book In Love With Love. She was trying to figure out why so many romance novels are epistolary: why the early ones are filled with letters, the later ones filled with texts and emails between characters. Her conclusion, more or less, was that texts are important within love stories because love is so intangible, and so hard to find proof of after morning has broken and kisses have faded. You want to point to something, after the person has gone away: See, right there. They love me. I can see it because they wrote it down.

But the boom in chatting technology has also created a boom in social expectation. We have to keep on writing it down, forever. And with that expectation, we may have lost a measure of good faith toward one another. We have lost the promise that our friendships flower in some seasons and sleep in others. Instead, there’s this feeling that our relationships are like financial stock, constantly spiking and dropping, and that one person will cash out on if they don’t see a proper return.

What’s interesting to me is that this anxiety runs parallel to the anxiety that we’re on our phones too much. It seems impossible to me that we could succeed at both. Or that we could succeed at both and still be actually good friends to our friends.

I’m not running for Friend of the Year or whatever, but what I will say about myself is that when I’m on a hang, I’m 100% focused on the hang. I am a good listener! I will remember everything we talked about it and I will follow up with you about it later. I am not checking my phone during the movie. I am not taking annoying videos during the gig, because we both know what the gig is for, which is to hold hands and cry. And these things are only possible when/if my focus is healthy and my anxiety is low. These things are only possible when you are not fucking addicted to your phone. Our phone usage cannot be dictated by our most phone-addicted friend, in the same way our nights out can’t be dictated by our most substance-addicted friend.

The conclusion here is not that I become a better texter, but that we all become worse texters, together. I can actually handle an exponentially raising beauty standard, because I am a big girl and I know when to block a botox clinic on Instagram. But what I cannot handle is the communication standard, and the constant low level concern that I am hurting peoples feelings. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much about this; maybe that’s what 2014’s ‘ban bossy’ campaign was all about.

And while I’m here: are we in a fight?