Reclaiming Conversation (23 page)

The texts she was sending to her other friends were logistical: where to meet up, whether to go out for Chinese food or Italian. But Julian could not see that. All he sees is that she is online but not responding to him. She may not be doing anything wrong, but her relationship suffers.

Cameron minimizes Vanessa's problem. He says that after all, the transparency of WhatsApp “keeps you honest,” but Ryan sees her point. The program is just transparent enough to do damage. And he would be annoyed if a girl was texting other friends if she hadn't gotten back to him. More than that, WhatsApp makes it impossible to time your texts for maximum seductive impact. Ryan wants to wait twenty minutes before getting back to a girl so she will fantasize about what he might be up to. But she won't be getting jealous if she can see that he is on his phone texting. The transparency of WhatsApp, he says, “erases the
entire point
of texting because it dictates when you have to respond.”

For Ryan, the advantage of texting in a romantic context is that it allows you to hide in a sexy way. Now, as he considers WhatsApp, it is as though the designers of the technology didn't understand its human purpose. At this point the conversation among the friends turns technical: This is a bad feature. Which phones and which apps have it?
Which don't? How can this feature be disabled? How can you work around it?

It turns out that there is much expertise to go around once these clever twenty-two-year-old minds are concentrated on the problem. They end up concluding that to keep romantic texting alive, the best solution is to go “retro” in your technology. They want some version of “I didn't get your mail” or “I was out when your call came in.” These kinds of lies have always been staples of romantic exchange. And these young people want technology
to make space for them
. Elaine thinks she has her worst problems solved by turning off her iPhone's “read receipt” feature. This means that she can at least pretend not to have seen a text. “If I want to take my time responding, I can still say, ‘Oh, I put my phone down for a second—so sorry.'”

R
yan worries that too much information takes the romance out of texting. I have dinner with nine San Francisco professionals in their late twenties who hold texting up to a different standard: Does it increase the efficiency of their romantic lives?

Our dinner and the two-hour conversation that follows take place in a downtown conference room so that the participants can join as their workday ends. Most hold their phones during our meeting. A few put their phones on the table. One young woman begins dinner with her phone in her pocketbook, but when it vibrates she takes it out and announces that she will leave it on the table because she is more relaxed when she can see it.

And phones are at the center of our conversation. At this meeting, the men complain that their girlfriends are always on their phones. The women complain that their boyfriends won't take their eyes off their screens. They are certainly not alone. A recent survey reports that nearly half of cell-owning young people in serious relationships say that their partners have been
distracted by their mobile phones
while they were
together. Callie, twenty-six, who works in sales for a large insurance company, has a boyfriend in the financial industry. Even at intimate moments, she says, screens are close at hand.

My boyfriend drives me nuts. . . . He has four computer screens. So he is used to looking at everything going on all the time. . . . So he can actually listen to me and text other people at the same time. But because I can't do that, I think he's not listening and I'll get so mad and be, like, “You're not paying attention to anything I'm saying to you!”

I ask Callie about the effects of these always-present screens on her relationship. She says it forces her to concentrate when she approaches her boyfriend. “I definitely don't talk to him about nonsense because I need to make the best use of my time with him. Because if he is actually spending time listening, I'm making sure that I'm saying things that are actually worth saying.”

What about the role of small talk in love? Talk about nothing at all? Callie makes it clear that her relationship does not have a lot of room for that. When she has face-to-face time, there is “just no nonsense.”

Callie offers that sometimes she and her boyfriend find a place for “nonsense” on Gchat. Generally, her boyfriend has Gchat in one window on his screen while he keeps an eye on business in other windows. But sometimes, Callie says, she will just put her hand over his screen and fondly say, “Enough.” As she makes this gesture in the group, pantomiming her hand on his screen, her phone rings. Everyone laughs.

Ray, twenty-eight, comments on what it's like to have a relationship when you compete with screens: “I think the way we're going, a lot of people are getting the feeling that even though the person they're with is there, you don't get the feeling of real connection. You just have information.”

Kim is a college junior from New Jersey. Like Callie, she is frustrated by a boyfriend who is always on his phone. And she shares Ray's concern that conversations in her relationship are mostly about information. It's hard to make them about more because they are usually being
interrupted by an incoming text. Her patience is wearing thin. These days, she says, “If me and my boyfriend fight and we are talking and he stops to text someone back, even if it is for two seconds, I'm, like, ‘What are you doing? I'm not good enough for you?' I freak out.”

Recently Kim's boyfriend broke his phone:

And these past couple [of] weeks, because he hasn't had a phone, the interactions we have—even if it is a date night or lying in bed doing nothing, it's so much better. I'm not trying to compete with a phone. It's so much easier. It's a lot more relaxing. It puts my mind at ease.

Kim reflects on her conversations with her boyfriend before the broken phone: “He owns his own business . . . so that means he is constantly on his phone. So our conversation would be really small. It would be about nothing important. At dinnertime, it would be me saying, ‘Who are you texting?' or ‘How's your iPhone?'” Kim got used to a conversational regimen so restricted that for her, now, a “larger” conversation with her boyfriend means things as simple as talking about their day.

T
he San Francisco twenty-somethings are always pressed for time. They work so many hours a week that they barely see their partners. It seems natural that when they talk about love and texting, they stress its efficiency. For others, what messaging, email, and texting can do is bring order and cool into the untidiness of relationships.

In
Taipei
, a 2013 novel heralded as depicting the post-net sensibility, the lovers at the center of the story use technology to avoid the risks of real-time arguments. When they're angry they agree to type to each other.

Erin sat at the foot of the bed, facing away from Paul, who lay on his back with his MacBook against his thighs, and they communicated by email (
they'd agreed to type, not talk
, whenever one of them, currently Paul, felt unable to speak in a friendly tone) for around fifty minutes.

Life tracks art. Some couples tell me they have their arguments online (usually on Gchat or instant messenger) so they can keep a record. One desired goal is to make the fights more “fair.” Some use “
fight tracking” apps
. Here, the idea is that gathering more data about the pattern of quarrels will help couples improve their relationships.

Talia, in her early thirties, talks about how she and her partner used to work out their differences in online chat sessions. “What I like about chat for fighting is that I'm getting my case out and I'm sure I will be heard. When we argue face-to-face, I get so upset that I don't remember what I said. . . . We were having these fights and it was destructive.” In online talk, she can collect her thoughts and leave a record. But after a while, she and her partner had second thoughts about the online quarrels. The method began to feel awkward and they wanted to return to what Talia calls a more “spontaneous” style of arguing. But they could not go back to how they had done things before. They knew they would miss the “accountability” of online chat with its data trail. They found a compromise. As soon as a conversation gets heated, they begin to videotape it. So now they have an archive of their “fights.”

And our promise to each other is that when we feel we are in that destructive space, we stop, take a break, and continue that face-to-face conversation on tape. We take the value of what we used to get out of fighting by text and chat—that we had the record—and use it for face-to-face.

Leaving a record makes both Talia and her partner feel safer. They won't be misheard. They are trying to use technology to make their
relationship—untidy as all relationships are—more tidy. In the language that I hear so much, their goal is to make the conversations of romance more efficient and controlled.

But getting to know other people, appreciating them, is not necessarily a task enhanced by efficiency. This is because people don't reveal themselves, deeply, in efficient ways. Things take time to unfold. There is need for backtracking and repetition. There is a deepening of understanding when you have gone through the same thing twice, or more.

I
n a stand-up routine on modern romance, Aziz Ansari asks people to raise their hands if they have ever just stopped texting someone when they were not “into” the relationship. A theater of hands goes up. Then he asks people to raise their hands if that is how they'd like someone to convey to them a lack of continuing interest. There are no hands. There is a lot we accept as the new normal that we don't like at all.

Sloane, a college junior, went on only four dates with Evan, but each one lasted more than five hours. Sloane felt they had that all-elusive “chemistry.” On their fourth date, Evan initiated a serious conversation, a discussion of what each of them wanted from the relationship. Sloane says, “I told him that I was happy to be with him as long as we both enjoyed each other's company. He seemed relieved and pleased with my response . . . but he made it clear that he didn't want to use ‘labels,' which was an unusually cliché thing for him to say.”

Sloane left the conversation about “no labels” feeling excited. She thought that she and Evan were at the beginning of something important. But then, she didn't hear from Evan for a few days. Usually he would have sent her a text or several, just to check in. Finally, on a Saturday morning, as she was just home from a run, Sloane looked at her phone to check the time and saw the green message bubble
containing an excerpt of a text she had missed. Scanning the message, she registered the phrases “amazing woman,” “wish you all the best,” and “not the best time.”

I put the phone down as though it were some terrible thing and walked to the kitchen, where I sat on the floor with my back against the refrigerator. My heart was still pounding rapidly, but it was no longer from the exercise. I was upset to receive this message because it was such bad news, because he had chosen to text me this bad news, and because it contradicted the understanding I thought we had between us.

Sloane responds to Evan's text with a simple text accepting his decision. (“thanks for letting me know,” “best of luck,” etc.) But Sloane wants closure and there is none in this transaction.

What just happened? Sloane is left with questions that won't go away about Evan's unavailability to have a conversation. She feels devalued. “If he actually cared for me, why didn't he make the effort to have a conversation with me so that I could address his concerns?” From this follow other painful possibilities. Her mind races round and round: “Because he did not want to have such a conversation, he must have decided that he did not care for me, after all.”

Beyond the rejection, Sloane cannot let go of the idea that Evan misunderstood her point of view in the “funny conversation” that ended in the discussion of “labels.” Sloane worries that she gave Evan the impression that any relationship with her would require commitment. In fact, she would have been happy to take their relationship slowly. “If we had actually had a breakup conversation, I would have had fewer—if any—questions like these.” Despite all of this, Sloane feels silenced by the breakup text. She wishes she could be certain that Evan did not misunderstand her. But she comes to this conclusion: You don't answer a breakup text with a call saying, “I want to talk.”

I
am in Seattle at a three-day conference on social media, and one of the other speakers, a thirty-six-year-old architect named Adam tells me he would like to share his story about love enabled by online communication. Specifically, he wants to show me the electronic archive of his now broken-off relationship with Tessa, then an art student, with whom he had spent three joyful, if turbulent, years.

Adam says that it was with Tessa that he was his best self. Now, even three years after the relationship ended, he is still sorting through the question “Who am I outside of this relationship?” After every failed relationship, lovers try to hold on to the “better self” they felt themselves to be in the presence of their beloved. So Adam is asking a very old question.

But since so much of Adam's relationship with Tessa took place online, this old question has a new twist. Online, Adam was able to “edit” himself. Now, he wonders if he needs editing delays to be his best self. And how does the fact that he has an archive of his relationship with Tessa—the two were electronically in touch from thirty to fifty times a day—change how he looks back and how he moves forward?