Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Texting With Boys

Jennifer Daniel

It is a common complaint that modern communication has ruined romance. Wouldn’t so much heartache be avoided, people claim, if we still spoke on the phone, if romantic intent could not be categorized through the time lapsed since a text message is returned?

I am not so sure. When I was a kid, I dreamed that someday, in the future, it would become socially acceptable to communicate with others via notes. It seemed like the easiest way to solve a problem that I saw all around me — that of misunderstanding.

I grew up in a family where the written word was sacrosanct. Whenever there was an argument and one of my sisters or all three of us would retreat to our shared bedroom, wailing, unable to speak, it was resolved through notes furiously passed back and forth — impassioned letters about what we had done to each other, point by point rebuttals to prove why one sister was so utterly wrong. I was always devastated when my sisters would claim they didn’t remember what they said in the argument itself. If only we were talking via notes all the time, I could have some kind of transcript, some kind of way to prove that I was right.

Unsurprisingly, this tendency to want to converse with a transcript at all times — when exhibited by a 250-pound, dark-skinned high school freshman — was not socially rewarded. I had a very lonely adolescence, exacerbated by the fact that, by the time I reached high school, I had more or less stopped speaking in public. Today, I would probably be diagnosed with selective mutism, but back then I just took it as another way that I was in the wrong. I watched “The Piano” over and over again, envious of the little notebook Holly Hunter wore around her neck — in my opinion, the chicest accessory; her notes and her silence got her Harvey Keitel, after all.

I wondered what was in those notes. I wondered how men and women actually talked to each other. For most of my life, I had lived in a world full of women — women who were funny and sarcastic and biting and wise and meticulous with their language. But I was savvy enough to know that this was the way we used words when we were with one another, that something got lost in translation when we tried to speak to men.

I did not date in high school. By the time I started dating in college, my childhood wish had come true. Texting and Gchat were just beginning to take off — here it was, the chance to send endless notes to a boy and best of all, the chance to have a transcript of your flirtation.

I thought the best way to make a boy like you was to prove how smart and witty you were, to provide numerous links to obscure songs and long interviews with dead authors. Wasn’t that the advantage of written communication? I instant-messaged crushes for hours while bored at work. I had one boyfriend with whom I discovered it was possible to send too many emails on a Gmail thread — the service cut us off after 100 and made us start anew. “Wait, what?” friends said, when I showed them this long stretch of communication and the break on the screen where the email service interrupted sweet nothings to tell us, here, this is too many emails, we’ve started a new thread for you.

During this time, my oldest sister gave birth to her son. I remember when she called me to tell me she was having a boy — “I just — I don’t know what to do with him.”

“He’s still in the womb.”

“Yeah, in there, just, like, hanging out.” In her panic, she spoke of him as if he were already a giant teenager, sprawled across a couch, watching the game on TV. “What do you do with a boy?”

My nephew is one of my favorite people in the world. He is funny and sarcastic and smart. When he was old enough to walk and I visited my sister for long weekends, he would always come to find me first when he woke up in the mornings.

He would sit beside me and babble — first baby sounds, then as he grew, the nomenclatures of Minecraft and recaps of the antics of obscure YouTube celebrities. At first, I made an effort to listen because I did not want to hurt his feelings. Sometimes, I would try to engage him in a playful argument. “Snow leopards, Auntie Kaitlyn,” he would begin, deadly serious, “are nocturnal.”

“Ah, you sure about that buddy?”

And then he would be adamant. “Yes, Auntie Kaitlyn, yes; listen to me.”

I quickly learned it did not matter whether I engaged him in debate at all. He only wanted me to sit beside him and listen. “Oh, really? That really happened?” I would mumble, half asleep, when he came at dawn to tell me about the latest maneuver he’d managed in a video game.

“Yes, yes!” he would say, beaming. So this is what men want, I thought to myself. Not litigation. Just someone to sit and listen and say “Mm hmmm” occasionally.

It was a cynical approach, but when I, newly single, applied it to dating, it got fantastic results. “Mm hmmm, and then what?” I said, and got back: “You are an amazing conversationalist. I could talk to you for hours.” Is this it? I thought to myself. Is this all?

It was not all, not for me. After those successful first dates, I could never help myself. In person, I could control my need for endless conversation. But texts were different. It was the promise of the written word to be precise. I sent text after text — jokes and book recommendations and pictures of funny things I saw and, unsurprisingly, I did not get many second dates with many normal people.

That was until I met my current partner, who sent me 10 texts after our first date — of his new haircut, of his walk to work, of his conversation with his landlady about me. I could send him hundreds of messages and he did not seem scared away. It was a relief.

A few months ago, though, my nephew, now 7 years old, got his first cellphone. There was his number on our family group text, a long message chain that my sisters and I use as a place to deposit our complaints about the day and bad puns. So far, his contributions have been a string of plane and car emojis. Excited, though, to have this new way to talk to him, I sent him a message.

“Hi! It is your Auntie Kaitlyn! I am so happy to text with you. I love you!”

I saw the flickering bubbles that showed he was typing back. Then nothing. For the next 12 hours, his side of the conversation was blank. Finally, a day later, a single response: “Hey.”

How quickly they learn, I thought.

Kaitlyn Greenidge (@surlybassey) is the author of the novel “We Love You, Charlie Freeman.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Texting With Boys. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT