Mr Darcy never had to deal with this stuff.
Is there any offline dating anymore? Even if one meets a person in…person, today we’ll have a flurry of text messages, Facebook status updates, Instagram photos, and more that doesn’t involve face to face time with the person that is a twinkle in our eye. One way or another, even for rural farmers, an online relationship is going to be part of it in this day and age for most people.
Texting is a bigger part than it ever was, no doubt. And article after article, study after study, show that women today do love texting. Men, it’s ok to set a boundary on the types of texting you’re willing to work with. That is, if you have boundaries on such a thing. But I will say it is a masculine-type thing to define one’s own boundaries on whatever…even if it’s texting.
Loving the texting
- Texting is an effective filter. Though “effective” is a strong tool, it can be used for good or for evil.
- Texting is also excellent at letting one think something through before responding. One can prepare their message ahead of time, think it through, send the edited version. If a topic is to…ah…heavy, one can hide safely behind the warm comfort of their phone and send their message and not have to be worried about getting bombarded by some strong reply.
- Texting is also great for fun little banter.
- Texting works great for some types of flirting.
- Texting is good for keeping tabs on your teenage kids.
- Texting is very good for semi-discreetly contacting somebody when you’re in some meeting and can’t talk out loud on the phone to them.
- Texting is good at last minute updates for linking up.
- Texting allows one to send a pic or a link.
- Texting is a tool to get you to the next step of talking together.
So is it the perfect form of communication? Heavens no!
Dump the texting for
When we communicate face-to-face, over 90% of our communication is non-verbal. The look on our face, our body posture, our inflections, our sighs, our humanity. Even on a real-time-two-way-streaming-audio (which we used to call a telephone call), we’re able to pass along a large part of our humanity and meaning in the conversation.
Texting takes away that 90%.
- Texting is amazingly bad at conveying really important concepts in life. Suppose you’re looking at the Grand Canyon at sunset with the hundreds of colors that play off the desert rock with beautiful long shadows and off in the quiet distance you can hear the scream of an Eagle as you see it soar in the updraft from the mile-deep canyon below. But with texting, you would only be able to view this through a straw a tiny bit at a time.
- Texting is lousy at conveying positive emotions. We often have to embed extra emoticons 🙂 to make sure the other person knows we’re passing along a joke or sarcasm or light-heartedness.
- Texting can very often go downhill in emotion. If our emotion is not coming through in the texts, humans have the ability to assume that the text is negative which results in a downward spiral of the conversation. We seem to rarely assume opposite and spiral upwards.
- Texting is royally awful as resolving heavy relationship difficulties.
Don’t
- Consider your ongoing texting the relationship itself, a relationship requires being together at some point; even fighting for the moments you can have together.
- Say your first “I love you” over text
- Ask somebody out for those early dates via text
- Send unwanted sexting messages/pics
- Break up using text
- Ghosting someone that you’ve had face-to-face/telephone conversations with for weeks/months.
- Incessantly text someone to take you back when they’ve let you know they wish to end things.
Some of these are things that don’t add to a relationship much while others are downright dishonorable.
Asking somebody out, sure, the texting can help to update, modify, adjust, schedule the already extended invitation. But show some class and invite them for that first date in person or on the telephone. If they’re blocking opportunities for you to talk to them, then they are the ones hiding dishonorable behind their phone and it’s time to move on. That’s not a person with which you would want to build a relationship.
On the sexting side, first, this is an LDS-centric article, so sending a phallic-pic is downright off the list anyway for an LDS honoring single adult. In the non-LDS world, women report getting these dirty pics right off the bat from men, quite often in fact. Sometimes via online dating sites, other times after they’ve given out their cell number. But even in the LDS-side of things, many LDS women have talked about how they received unwanted sexting. So regardless of religious things, save that for when both parties are on board with it.
Breaking up over texting. Is there anyone reading this that thinks (other than in times of abuse) that this is ok? If so, these articles are likely not for a person of your set of values.
And to be sure, there are times to cut-off communications with a person (ghosting), but only in times of abuse from that person after one has notified them that things are ending. If that’s not the situation, then it is the ghoster that is behaving poorly.
Whether the next step is closer together or further apart
- Drive to where they are and meet in person or
- Pick up the phone and talk
Men, if you’ve been on the giving end of some of these negative texting behaviors, it’s time to contemplate what is honorable.
LdsContemplations 