Modern Romance (5 page)

For this group, voice mails provided a screening system of sorts. When they explained this, it made sense to me. If the message was from someone they’d met briefly at a bar, it let them hear the guy’s voice and made it easier to sort out the creeps. One girl raved about a nice voice mail a guy had recently left her. I kindly requested she play it and heard this gem: “Hey, Lydia. It’s Sam. Just calling to say what’s up. Gimme a ring when you get a chance.”

THAT WAS IT.

I pleaded to know what was so great about this. She sweetly recalled that “he remembered my name, he said hi, and he told me to call him back.”

Never mind the fact that what she described was the content of LITERALLY EVERY VOICE MAIL IN HISTORY. Name, hello, please call back. Not really a boatload of charm on display. To fail this test, a guy would have to leave a message that said: “No greeting. This is a man. I don’t remember you. End communication.”

When you look at overall numbers on communication, you see that we are generally texting more and calling less. According to Nielsen, Americans’ use of phones for voice calls peaked in 2007; we’ve been calling less, and speaking for fewer minutes, ever since.
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This change in communication may have some side effects, though. In her book
Alone Together
, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle convincingly makes the case that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining.

When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation—kids on the left, parents on the right—a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents’ side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids’ side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them.

It made me wonder whether our ability and desire to interact with strangers is another muscle that risks atrophy in the smartphone world. You don’t need to make small talk with strangers when you can read the
Beverly Hills, 90210
Wikipedia page anytime you want. Honestly, what stranger can compete with a video that documents the budding friendship of two baby hippopotamuses? No one, that’s who.

At a minimum, young people are growing anxious about real-time phone conversations with people they don’t know well, and particularly with potential dates. “I have social anxiety, and having to respond or react on the spot to a phone call or in person would make me overanalyze everything and put myself in a tizzy,” one young woman told us. “I would want to take my time and think of a response that is genuine.”

The obvious advantage of a text is that a guy can text someone without having to gather the courage needed for a phone call. If you accept Turkle’s notion that men are also in general getting worse at spontaneous conversation, it makes sense that this trend will continue to climb.

I discussed this change in communication with Turkle in Los Angeles, and she brought up an interesting thought about getting asked out over the phone back in the day. “When a guy called and asked you out back then, it was a very special thing. You felt special and it was very flattering that he gathered the courage to do it.”

When I discussed what I had heard from the interviews with young people today, Turkle said that being asked out through a text message has become so banal that it no longer gives women that sense of flattery. As far as they know, the guy who has sent the message is hitting up lots of women and waiting to see who writes back. Unless he has sent something truly distinctive and personal, a text just isn’t all that meaningful.

After many conversations with women in the single world, I must concur.

THE MODERN BOZO

One firm takeaway from all our interviews with women is that most dudes out there are straight-up bozos.
I’ve spent hours talking with women and seeing the kind of “first texts” they get from guys, and trust me, it’s infuriating. These were intelligent, attractive, amazing women and they all deserved better.

Some people say that it doesn’t matter what you text someone. If they like you, they like you. After interviewing hundreds of singles, I can scientifically confirm that this is total bullshit.

For those who doubt me, here is an example from a show I did at the Chicago Theatre in the spring of 2014.

During that tour, after doing material about texting, I would ask if anyone in the audience had recently met someone and had been texting back and forth. If they had, they would come up to the stage and I would pick a few people and read, analyze, and ask them about what was happening in their messages.

At this particular show I was speaking with Rachel, who had met a guy at a good friend’s wedding. As it happened, the guy was also a friend of her sister’s, so he had a pretty good shot at a first date with her. She was single. She was interested. All he had to do was send her a simple message introducing himself and asking her to do something.

Here’s what happened.

He sends his first message:

As soon as I said “texty,” it was clear that no one sitting in the 3,600-seat Chicago Theatre would ever fuck this dude in a million years. “Texty,” for whatever reason, seemed to be unequivocally disgusting to every one of us there.

He might as well have added: “BTW I have a really disgusting next-level STD! Haha :-) but for real I do.”

Rachel wrote back ten minutes later:

He wrote back shortly:

Rachel never met Will. After a few messages of this nature, Rachel stopped responding. None of us know Will. He may be a kind, handsome man with a heart of gold. But all we have to go on is those messages. And those messages have shaped in our minds a very dorky, terrifyingly Caucasian weirdo. Everything from “texty” to “tooooootally” to “Feliz Cumpleaños as well!” had destroyed all chances of Rachel’s wanting to meet Will in real life. So please, don’t let anyone tell you what you text someone doesn’t matter. If they don’t believe you, “texty” introduce them to Will and they’ll toooooootally change their mind.

The interesting thing about text is that, as a medium, it separates you from the person you are speaking with, so you can act differently from how you would in person or even on the phone. In
Alone Together
Sherry Turkle tells the story of a young boy who had a standing appointment for a Sunday dinner with his grandparents. Every week, he’d want to cancel and his mom would tell him to call his grandparents and tell them he wasn’t coming. However, he never would, because he couldn’t bear to hear the disappointment in their voices. If it were text, though, he probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. As a medium, it’s safe to say, texting facilitates flakiness and rudeness and many other personality traits that would not be expressed in a phone call or an in-person interaction.

Beyond flakiness, as far as dating goes, I’ve observed many men who, while hopefully decent human beings in person, become sexually aggressive “douche monsters” when hiding behind the texts on their phone. The messages being sent are inarguably inappropriate and often quite offensive, but, again, over text the consequences of the recipient’s being offended are minimal. You don’t see their face. You don’t hear their voice. And they aren’t there in person to look horrified or throw a heavy object at your dumb head.

On the other hand, on the tiny off chance they are interested, you are all set. It’s this dim hope that many dumb dudes are clinging to when they send these painfully obnoxious texts.

A website called Straight White Boys Texting has become a hub for women to submit these horrifying (and often hilarious) texts that guys have sent them.

As described on the site, the blog came about due to the phenomenon in which a guy texts an inept sexual advance like “
hey what’s your bra size ;)
”
or “
what would you do if you were here haha lol ;)
”
apropos of nothing, in order to try to hook up with someone.

This was known as a “straight white boy text,” hence the name of the blog, but, to be clear, the site is inclusive of douchey dudes of all races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations.

Here are a few favorites of mine:

This gentleman wastes no time. What’s interesting to me, though, is would this guy ever act this way in real life? Doubtful that he’d just go up to a woman and say, “Afternoon sex?” and wink at her—unless he was some kind of R&B superstar, in which case he’d be doing it all the time and it would possibly be quite successful.

Here’s another:

Again, I have to assume if this guy met this woman at a bar, his introduction would be something better than “I like your tits.”

The site, and women’s phones everywhere, are filled with cringeworthy exchanges like this. And clearly, these are extremely horrible messages. But from our interviews we learned that even for men who don’t write such blatantly disgusting nonsense, the smallest changes in what they text on a screen can make a huge difference in their dating success face-to-face.