Ope Pardon, No. 13: Banter Buddies

I am, generally speaking, a person who texts early and often.

Whether it's because I am American or a Millennial or debilitatingly concerned about inconveniencing people, that is simply who I am and I see no real reason to change it now.

I am not, I don't think, unnervingly responsive — while my very best friends may receive shamelessly instantaneous reactions, I know how spooky it can feel to receive a response 0 seconds after sending a message so I try to wait a respectable amount of time. But I do try to respond in relative short order after seeing the message — in part because I know that, personally, if I don't, I am liable to leave it for anywhere from three days to six months while falling into a crippling spiral of guilt/avoidance about the fact I have left it unaddressed.

In any case, lately I have been feeling unmoored in my texting habits, frustrated by those of others and generally curious about why I am so hung up on what is perhaps the modern relationship's most understandable communication variable. And I think AIM is to blame.

I like to think I am a reasonable person when it comes to respecting the wide breadth of texting and phone habits, which is why it is, for example, with Herculean effort that I am not reading too much into the fact one of my friends will leave me repeatedly on read for months at a time but then react like it is the second coming of our lord and savior when we run into each other at a party.

I am loathe to use the royal we but we can, I hope, admit that we all have our phones with us nearly all the time. Yes we have jobs and obligations and the best of us put our phones away during social occasions too but the fact that we have instilled so many functions into one device means that if I am "reading the news" on the metro on my way to work, I will also immediately see your message come in. My mother, founding member of the "put your phone away at dinner" club, is one of the most responsive texters I know. We all have countless reasons for not responding to messages promptly, but "I didn't see it" is, in my personal opinion, frequently bullshit.

(That said, the other week I messaged a pal I was super close with in high school because my new therapist brands her website with her initials, which are incidentally the same as this friend's, and it reminded me of them and I wanted to reconnect and anyways, the only email address I had for my friend was their university one and I wasn't sure if that was still functional so I thought, guess I'll try Facebook Messenger! And they responded in a day or two but because I never use Messenger the app had gone dormant/self-deleted or whatever iPhone does to save storage and I never check Facebook on a browser unless I'm lightly snooping on someone I just met so I didn't see or respond to their response for like a month. So. There are always exceptions to the rule but MOSTLY there is no excuse for not seeing a message.)

In any case, I am a true believer that how much time it takes for someone to respond — and just as importantly, how they respond, i.e., with a one-word answer, an explanation for why it took eight hours or any effort to keep the conversation going — is not meaningless, especially in the early stages of a relationship (a term I use broadly).

It's natural that we all have different tiers of relationships, the pandemic has put this into even more stark display, and one way tiers differentiate themselves is in how keen we are to respond to them. (Best friends do circle all the way back around: You are allowed to take 24-48 hours — if not longer — to respond to a message that was an answer to a question you yourself asked if you are a) a stranger b) angry and/or petty c) a coworker and its outside working hours or d) on the best friend tier.)

My qualms, it should be said, are specifically with what I will call practical texting and conversational texting. The former is the texting to make plans or otherwise manage the logistics of life: are you free this day, what are you doing on July 13, can you watch my dog tonight my coworker invited me to watch the NBA Finals with him and his roommates at 2am and his girlfriend is afraid of dogs, etc. (Catch-up/check-in texting is a whole different game and one at which I am significantly worse and thus entirely less judgmental. Glass houses, etc.)

I can forgive (because there is nothing, really, to forgive) someone who isn't really a conversational texter, that just feels like a personality trait, but being a bad practical texter I find to be a borderline character flaw because you are, to some degree, holding up the other person's ability to move forward with their life and again, I am operating under the assumption you are never going more than three hours without at least seeing your phone screen and it's not that hard to send a quick response, even if the response is "I don't know" or "I can't say right now" or "let me get back to you." (I understand too that while my neuroses might dictate the need to give a response and to offer acknowledgment as soon as possible, someone else's might not let them respond until they could say definitively. Ah, what a rich tapestry of anxieties we negotiate.)

In any case, it is conversational texting that is really doing a number on me right now because I am trying to figure out whether someone not being a big texter is a legitimate relationship deal breaker.

As I said, I like to think I am understanding about different messaging styles and I do think I tend to defer to the other person and/or whatever texting behavior we adopted at the beginning of our relationship. Even among my best friends, I have "text everyday" besties, "quarterly check-in" besties, "ambient groupchat" besties and even "only when we're in each other's cities" besties. Not everyone is going to be a banter buddy, and I get that.

Mostly, I will text you as much as you text me. I do not have qualms about repeated messages — if I have thought of something else to tell you before you have had a chance to respond to my previous thought, I am not going to wait and risk forgetting it. I like to think I don't take this to psychotic ends and, it should go without saying, this all depends on my relationship to the person. I am not going to send you 14 unrelated memes in a row if we're not close like that.

Generally speaking, I consider it a sign of closeness and comfort to not overthink how I text a person, which can result in both a half-dozen unaddressed texts or nothing from me for four months.

That said, I do think how I message with someone makes a demonstrable difference on our relationship. Take for example, two friends I have here in Paris. With one of them, I chatter all day — firing off in-the-moment thoughts about an annoying coworker or the woman sitting at a cafe wearing cat ears who made uninterrupted eye contact with my dog while also kind of making what I, until that moment, assumed was the universal hand-and-mouth gesture for a blow job. The other friend, we just text to make plans and even that is pulling teeth. Say the three of us get dinner and I make reference to a coworker "who sucks" and for the first friend, I don't have to explain why — she already knows the myriad of small things this woman has done — but the other has to ask. Now I can explain in the moment that's no big deal, but he's not going to have as clear or detailed a picture. In the context of friendship, this difference can feel negligible and it would be honestly unsustainable to maintain many more daily background conversations than I already do. But with respect to romantic relationships, it feels a little weird to me that there might be 3-6 people who know my life better than a potential partner.

More to the point, though — and here is where I finally get to AIM — conversational texting is something I simply love to do. A hobby, if you will.

My quick responses are often a reflection not of social compulsion or etiquette but of a genuine desire to continue the conversation, to keep talking. With respect to relationships, I don't want a "good morning" text or a "hey :)" or "just thinking of you" in the middle of the day. What do I do with that? I want to wake up or leave my meeting to see what is just the natural continuation of whatever conversation we were already having.

And this, I believe, is the fault of, or more generously, the product of AIM.

‎MSN Messenger was the first instant messenger platform I started using, probably in the fourth or fifth grade. I created my first AIM account in the seventh grade because that was what was popular at my new school after we moved. Then, for some reason, Skype was the messenger of choice at my next school. College was when everything shifted to phones so it was BBM (#neverforget) and also just... unlimited texting with no real computer corollary. (Somehow I missed the Gchat era.) When I started working, it was Skype and then Slack and having iMessage on my work Mac. Now, it's WhatsApp too.

Which is just to say, for about the last 20 years, I have been in the habit of having uninterrupted conversations with my friends in some form or another. We would hang out at school and then go home and chat on AIM. I sometimes used these platforms to talk with friends who had moved or were an ocean away, but largely, I was talking to the people I had last seen four hours ago. In boarding school, I used to Skype message with a friend of mine who lived like four doors down the hall. We had most of our classes together and usually had just seen each other at dinner, but there was always more to say — something else to chatter about.

To me, then, the constant patter of links and memes and dumb thoughts of no particular importance that characterize my texting today is a continuation and recreation of a dialogue that I have enjoyed since elementary school. I love talking every day on and off to my friends.

A work pal, with whom I would chatter most of the day on Slack, once told me that in high school he didn't talk much to his friends after school because he would see them the next day and I thought, wow, that logic has never occurred to me. It is more common than not for me to end up a catch-up phone call or part ways after drinks with a totally serious "bye! I'll probably text you in 20 minutes." And then I do!

A guy I was seeing once asked if I didn't think texting so much would mean we wouldn't have anything to talk about in person and I replied that has literally never been a problem for me. I am quite comfortable with silence but the truth is with people I like and am close to, I will almost always have something more I want to ask you or say. Mostly because if we're that close, you just become privy to my non-stop inner monologue. Once, when I was really little, we were driving back from (more or less) Detroit to (more or less) Chicago and it was late and my mom thought I would definitely sleep the whole trip and instead I talked for three hours straight.

What I am saying is that for a quiet and/or shy person, I really like to talk. (Did my affinity for messaging come from a shyness speaking up IRL at school? A question for my therapist, perhaps.) Consequently I see no reason not to respond to messages in relative short order.

That is, after all, how conversations work. If I wanted to wait days (or more) between correspondence I would write emails and letters, which I also do, because I (obviously) enjoy writing at length and postal mail rules. (If you would like a letter from France, reply to this email with your address.)

Anyways, enough of this. I have some texts to respond to.