Reclaiming Conversation (22 page)

A
s Danny says “Next,” he makes a gesture with his finger; it looks as though he is swiping his phone. It's the swipe gesture from Tinder. I first met the gesture on Chatroulette, a website which lets you cycle through video sessions with people all over the world. Danny wasn't talking about Chatroulette when he shared his romantic ennui (and Chatroulette was never intended for dating), but its aesthetic of moving on with a swipe or a click has become part of our conversation about romance. “Nexting” has become part of our emotional ecology.

Danny says that for him the combination of infinite choice and anonymity on dating sites is “toxic.” He spends hours in front of the computer, on a daily routine: He checks his social media sites and looks at
the relationship status of friends. Does he have friends who can be converted into lovers? Then he moves on to checking the relationship status of friends of friends. And then he moves on to Tinder. He tells himself that he is looking for a “real relationship,” indeed, for a wife, but he admits that his daily routine often feels “unreal.” He says, “Even when I am talking to someone I know, it can feel like a game.” A twenty-five-year-old woman makes a similar comment about how she is never “off the game.” She remarks that “if you have your phone, and you always have your phone, you are always looking for a date . . . or you can be.”

Terry, a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in mathematics, says that when he uses apps to meet people, “I feel that I am processing people. . . . And if I start to text them . . . these are interviews. Like recruitment interviews. I sometimes look at twenty girls in an evening, just to look, and I text with five. . . . It's a game you want to win. You get people to want to talk to you. You refine those skills.”

Terry tells me that this round of what starts to feel “like recruitment interviews” rarely leads to something more intimate. But he also says that sometimes he almost stops caring. Sometimes he just tries to beat his previous score on how many girls will talk to him. When his dating game becomes more salient than its ostensible goal, he is in a loop that brings to mind the compulsions of the “machine zone.” In the Facebook zone, you don't want to leave but you don't know why you want to stay. On the dating app, you can't break away, but you're not so sure you want a date. For the math student, the game becomes getting women to respond to him. The high comes from the feeling that anything is possible.

We last saw Liam at a bar in the West Village, armed with a technology that seems to offer infinite possibility—gleaming profiles of women within a ten-block radius. But technology, says Liam, has made it almost impossible for a “normal guy” like him to get a woman's attention. He says that one girl he had been pursuing, Rachel, is attractive, so her time at any party is usually spent monitoring her phone for “best offers.”

A lot of guys are texting, getting in touch. So, there is a lot of pressure on me to get her out of that party. To get her away from her phone. A lot of
times, girls think that a guy is trying to make sexual moves on them, but really it isn't. I'm just trying to think of a way to get them away from their phones.

When I talk with women, I learn that Liam does not have it so wrong. Women talk about being on dates with men and going to the bathroom to check their phones to see who else has contacted them. They say they feel a little guilty, but over time, acting on the impulse to check your phone—to check your options—comes to feel normal. Consider Madeleine, thirty-two, a financial analyst in New York. She's out to drinks with a group of friends, including a man who seems interested in her. But, phone-enabled, she is clear that “drinks do not imply the entire evening.” Messages on her phone mean “things could go anywhere.” In this world, she says, “if I get a message from a guy who interests me and I want to leave the group of friends I'm with, I do. I usually go to the ladies' room to set things up so I'm not sitting at the table where people can look over my shoulder as I get too specific about my next plan.”

In settings such as this, the conversations that could keep someone's attention need to happen quickly.

I
t is cliché to say that love is all about timing. In the past, this usually referred to the timing of when lovers met. Were they ready for commitment? Were they on the rebound? Now, when people talk about timing, they are more likely to be talking about the micromanagement of messages. A small group of high school senior men discusses “timing rules.”

Darren explains that if a girl tries to contact you by writing on your Facebook wall, “It's almost common etiquette to wait a day to get back.” Why? “You don't want her to think that you are checking Facebook to see if you have messages.” Answering too soon could be interpreted that way.

Say you get a post from a girl on a Monday night at nine-thirty. You don't want to respond for maybe a day, maybe two days, because . . . of the creep factor. You don't want them to think . . . you are always on Facebook. So, if they said, “Hey, haven't seen you in a while. How're you doing?” you want to make them wait, maybe wonder. . . . Maybe if it's a girl you like, you want to have her think about you. That type of thing. Having them look forward to your response even more.

Darren continues. The rules of projecting nonchalance are similar if you are texting. “If you get a text message from someone, the ball's in your court, so you can make them sweat it out . . . for a half hour at least.” His friends agree. Luke offers: “You can't respond to a text too soon. You want people to think you have a life.” But waiting before responding to a text is what you do both to look good to a girl and to feel good about yourself. Jonas adds this: “You don't want to feel like a loser sitting at home. You don't want to feel ‘on call.' Of course, it's hard to stay cool when a girl is making you wait. . . . If you text a girl midday, and if she doesn't get back to you, you're kind of worried.”

Still, these young men see texting as a far better option than having to talk to a girl to ask her out. Talking is a commitment. Texting is low risk. In texting, says Jonas, if you don't like the outcome of the conversation,
you can pretend it didn't happen.

Let's say you wanted to talk to a girl and hang out with her: If you just texted, “Hey, what are you doing tonight?” that's so much different than calling her up and being, like, “Hey, what are you doing tonight?” She'll look and respond, like, “Oh, I don't know.” “Oh, maybe we can hang out later.” And it's a lot less pressure on you. . . . It's almost like you leave it out there, and if she's, like, “No, I don't want to hang out,” it's almost like you're not there to experience her shutting you down.

It's a paradox of the medium: Online exchanges exist forever, but you imagine the ones that didn't work out as not having happened at all.

After hearing these young men describe how they feel protected by texting, I speak to a young woman their age who confirms that the boys she knows like to keep things online for a long time before they make any plan to get together in person. She says, “It gives them cover. If things don't work out, they don't have to feel rejected. It's as though they weren't there to feel the embarrassment.
”

Her formulation “It's as though they weren't there to feel the embarrassment” is close to Jonas's “It's almost like you're not there to experience her shutting you down.” Texting allows for romantic conversations where rejection can't happen, because if it does, you never had the conversation.

Yet these young men make it clear that online flirting comes with its own unique problems. Unlike in “regular conversation,” if you make a mistake when texting, “it will never go away.” Messages are stamped and everything you say can be reviewed. So texting has you poised between feeling that your words are of no consequence (the conversation never happened) and feeling that any one word could do permanent damage.

And practice does not seem to make perfect. Eight college juniors, all of whom have been texting since they were thirteen, tell me they are still working on their timing. The men begin by talking about how careful they are to let just the right amount of time pass between receiving a text from a woman and responding to it. For Cameron, the magic number is twenty minutes. Ryan points out that it's hard to know the magic number, because if a woman responds to him immediately, he sometimes takes it as a good sign, but he sometimes thinks, “She's psycho, man.”

When Ryan throws out the idea that he might consider a woman “psycho” if she texted too soon, his tone is light. But the girls in the group know better than to take it as a joke. They've had experiences where men turned off if they were seen as too available online. And men recoil if a woman responds to a text with an actual telephone call. Elaine says, “As soon as a woman calls, it's like, ‘She's crazy.'” No one
disagrees with her. The intrusion of a telephone call, at least in the early stages of dating, crosses a line.

This point is reinforced by an older woman, Candice, thirty, who says that falling in love has silenced her. She's met someone she likes and is afraid to do anything but text him: “I'm dating a guy. I like him so much. I think I could fall in love with him. I don't want him to see how much I like him. If we speak on the phone, I will blow it.” So she arranges to have as few telephone calls as possible. She mentions that it was easier to navigate all of this when she was in college, with roommates. A group of them worked on her texts together. They helped her send “good messages.”

T
hese days, men and women find it natural to collaborate on romantic texts, particularly during the early days of a relationship. Dorian, twenty, describes his process of composition: “First, I can spend, like, ten minutes to write the message. And then I can ask my friend, ‘Dude, what do you think of that? Is that cool?' . . . And he'll say, ‘Yeah, that's good. Say it that way.'” Both men and women say collaboration in romantic texting is acceptable because the stakes are so high. Gregory, thirty, puts it tersely: “One strike and you're out.”

In face-to-face conversation, we see facial expressions and body language; we hear tone of voice. In texting, you don't have these rich clues, so small details of punctuation can mean the difference between being understood or not. And without context, small details easily lead to a rush to judgment.

Vanessa, one of the New Hampshire college juniors, talks about a text exchange where she may have misunderstood a small detail. She was texting with a visiting Spanish exchange student. In one of the Spaniard's first texts to her, he winked, using an emoticon—the combinations of keyboard punctuation that can resemble smiling faces, sad faces, and
indeed, winking faces. Vanessa says that she interpreted the wink as flirting. She says that she doesn't mind online flirting in general, but the emoticon wink seemed odd, sexual in an uncomfortable way. In her circle, you wouldn't do that. She never got back to him. As she finishes the story, Cameron laughs. He, too, has an emoticon story.

It is pretty much the same story. When an Italian exchange student sent him a wink the first time they texted, Cameron assumed he was being hit on and cut off the friendship. Vanessa and Cameron had both applied the “one strike and you're out” rule. But do foreigners perhaps use winks in a different spirit? The two friends laugh uneasily.

Vanessa says the story makes it clear that although her “whole life is texts,” she has a problem because texts are “not a good tool for flirting . . . because there is this amazing game theory tree of ‘What did that mean? Oh, he put in an exclamation point! Now what did that mean?'”

Vanessa says that when she texts, she relies heavily on emoticons because texts are read as angry unless you soften them with emoticons and punctuation, a lot of punctuation. “I always assume that when I send a text it will be read as my being two times as angry as if I were speaking the same words.” So she tries to correct. “I will do something like put two exclamation points and a smiley face just to be, like, ‘I am not mad.'” Cameron agrees: “You're right. My main thing when I get a text is that I can't tell if this person is mad.” Elaine says that this is the aspect of texting that makes her most nervous: “My fear that people are angry is the worst thing about texting. 'Cause a text will end with a period and you're, like . . . ‘Oh, you're furious with me.'” Ryan laughs. To him, when a girl adds an ellipsis, that is a very bad sign. “Or copious ellipses. The dreaded ellipses.”

This is a world where it is easy to get things wrong; that's why consultation is so frequent. And the sense of being on a tightrope is not something that people seem to grow out of. It was, after all, the thirty-year-old Gregory who said, “One strike and you're out.”

T
he new love talk depends on technology, but technology is not designed with love talk in mind. Vanessa explains that for the past year she has been dating Julian, who attends a university in London. They use WhatsApp to communicate because it makes it easy to text internationally. Vanessa says that she sometimes likes to check WhatsApp to see if Julian has texted her even when she doesn't have the time to text him back. Just seeing a message from Julian puts Vanessa in a good mood and she doesn't want to deny herself that. But WhatsApp shows when a user is or has been online. So when Vanessa goes online to read Julian's message but does not immediately compose her reply, Julian can see that she's online and feels hurt, ignored. “That causes a lot of issues,” says Vanessa. “Huge issues.”