Reclaiming Conversation (24 page)

When Adam and I first meet, he begins by quoting the comedian Chris Rock, who said that to marry a woman, you have only two questions you need to ask yourself: “Do you like to fuck her? Do you like to have dinner with her?” Adam says that Tessa more than met the Chris Rock standard: Talking with Tessa, including and especially over text and email, could feel like sex. “In talking to Tessa, I would find myself crying literally tears of joy, I felt so understood and so, like, pushed and challenged in a loving way. And I felt empathized with, and she knew just how to mock me in the way that I mock myself and vice versa.” But Chris Rock also said that on first dates, we don't send ourselves but we send our “representatives”; we send our best selves. Over time, our representatives can't do the job and “we” start to show up. And that is where
a relationship either works or doesn't. In digital connections, the danger is that we can keep sending in our representatives. So, it's harder to know what is working, if it is working.

Adam says, “The most important thing for Tessa was to feel empathy, that I was with her, sharing, on the same page.” Every couple has a contract, usually implicit, about what will make the relationship work. In this relationship, Adam was to provide empathy and Tessa would appreciate his efforts, tutoring him along the way.

In the end, Tessa accused Adam of being insufficiently empathic and broke things off. Three years later, Adam sees their split as inevitable. He was held to an unrealistic standard: “If every conversation has to fulfill these deep needs, then occasionally a conversation isn't going to.” And with Tessa, every conversation was put to a test.

Adam says he wanted to be the more “open” man that Tessa needed. He consoles himself that he gave it his best shot because electronic messaging allowed him to “pause and get it right” in his exchanges with Tessa. “If Tessa and I [had been a couple] at a time when emails and text messages were unavailable, I don't think we would have stayed together.”

A
dam and I have several meetings. At our first, he shows me the phone he used when he first met Tessa. It has long since been replaced, but his first exchanges with Tessa are “trapped” on it. After the breakup, Adam didn't know how to connect this phone to his computer and this propelled him into a frenzy of activity: “So my first step was to crazily transcribe our text messages onto paper. . . . I would painstakingly note what I said and what she said and I would have to jerk between the sent messages folder on this crappy phone to the received messages and then, from the notes I took on paper, I typed things into a computer file.”

There are still over a thousand messages left to transcribe, so in our interviews, Adam and I switch our attention from his old phone to computer files of transcribed conversations and then back again to the phone.

Adam considers his general texting strategy: “I try for the Twitter effect. . . . I want them short and explosive. Like little bon-bons. . . . Like gifts.” Even before he met Tessa, he says, his texts were “crafted.” But once he was writing to Tessa, things moved beyond craft. Now Adam was compelled by something deeper. He was trying to be what Tessa needed: “a better self, a more empathic person, someone more able to share himself.” Adam says that Tessa used texting to help him be that person.

I ask for examples. By this point in my research I'm not surprised that the first one I get involves punctuation. In texting, we've seen that punctuation is one of the main ways to express all of the information that tone of voice and body posture would convey in face-to-face conversation. And we've seen that putting so much interpretive weight on punctuation means that a lot of attention is paid to seemingly little things—say, using a period instead of ellipses, elements in a code both partners understand. So to show me how Tessa helped him be a “better self,” Adam looks through a group of texts and finds a message with a well-placed exclamation point. He is jubilant: “Here! Something as small as the word ‘Sure!' with an exclamation point. . . . She's recognizing my need to feel acknowledged.”

In another text, Tessa writes, “Just parked, will call!” Adam explains why this message is just right, punctuation-wise: “There's that kind of, like—there's a kind of joy that we're going to see one another soon.” Adam acknowledges that the codes can change and what matters is keeping up with them: “I mean, who knows? Five years from now, maybe it would have been, ‘Just parked, will call you.' Maybe that exclamation point would be gone.”

Adam remembers the day he received the “just parked” text. It was during one of the happiest times of his life. He was in love. He was getting things right with Tessa. And then he explains how, for him, getting things right depended on editing.

A
dam says that early in their relationship, Tessa would sometimes present him with a problem, and his first instinct was often to suggest a solution. For example, she told him about a misunderstanding with her thesis supervisor and Adam was ready with some advice. Adam tells me that giving Tessa advice was always a mistake. It made her feel that he was not listening to her but trying to fix things. “The right thing is usually to say it is hard to imagine her pain but that I am there for her.” But Adam admits that if Tessa brought up a problem during a face-to-face conversation, he often forgot himself and presented her with advice. He says that he did better online, where he had time to reflect and revise.

Adam looks for other examples that show how editing made him a better self. He pulls up a text he sent Tessa after a fight. Adam says that after this quarrel he was frightened, afraid of what would happen next. But in his text he lessened the tension by sending a photo of his feet, beneath which he wrote, “Try to control your sexual passion in seeing me in Crocs and socks.” In person, Adam says that his anxiety would have led him to try to corner Tessa into forgiving him. His panic would have made things worse. Online, he used humor to signal confidence in their enduring connection. So what the text communicated is not the “real” Adam; it's the Adam he wants to be.

Adam is troubled by the gap between his in-person self and the self he can summon in online exchanges. But the Adam I have before me is a reflective, caring man. Online, we do not become different selves. Our online identities are facets of ourselves that usually are harder for us to express in the physical realm. This is why the online world
can be a place for personal growth
. People work on desired qualities in the virtual and gradually bring them into their lives “off the screen.” Adam is in the process of recognizing that, in person, he is closer to the online Adam than he sometimes thinks.

In retrospect, Adam is aware that the intensity and frequency of their
digital communications encouraged Tessa's fantasy that their relationship could take “total empathy” as its goal. This made their relationship sure to fail. But Adam admits that during the relationship, he did not discourage Tessa's fantasy.
He tried to live it out
. He sums up how online life made his effort easier: “That Gchat box, it's delicious.”

There is always a fine line that separates romantic love from a complicity in which the boundaries between partners become blurred. Romantically, each becomes “lost” in the other. This kind of love can sound like a sought-after state. But when it happens, communication is blocked because each partner can only hear what he or she needs to hear to keep the fantasy alive. Continual texting does not cause this kind of relationship to develop, but it makes it easier to fall into. Adam talks about having Tessa “in his phone,” “in his pocket.”

So, in the end, Adam thinks his relationship with Tessa was made possible and then undone by texting. It supported an unrealistic fantasy of “total empathic understanding.” And even though Adam made a continual effort to present himself as he wanted to be, he shared so much and over such a long period that he revealed himself. And that self wasn't who Tessa wanted.

People feel that digital media put them in a comfort zone where they can share “just the right amount” of themselves. This is the Goldilocks effect. Texting and email make people feel in control, but when they talk in detail about their online exchanges, the stories are usually about misunderstandings and crossed signals. The feelings of control are just that: feelings.

In theory, digital media can keep you at the “just right” distance, but in practice, at least in romantic relationships, they rarely do that job. When two people are continually connected, over time, it is almost impossible to maintain any “just right” distance. So the Goldilocks effect is really the Goldilocks fallacy. And when Adam makes what he considers a “mistake,” it is on the record. Online, he reminds me, “once things are in black and white, every mistake is there to see and review and there is no forgetting.”

B
eyond the Goldilocks fallacy about emotional distance, there is another misunderstanding about what online communication offers. This is the data fallacy. This is the feeling that online exchanges give us so much data that we now know all that we need to know about our partners. Certainly enough to get it “just right.” Adam was reassured by the amount of information he had about Tessa, but too often, he had Tessa's words but no way to sense her body language, facial expression, or the cadence of her speech. So he often missed what he really needed to know, what her presence would have provided.

One such lapse occurred in a Gchat exchange that took place toward the end of their relationship. Adam presents it to me as a “good conversation” even though it upset Tessa. As he describes it, it seems clear that he couldn't see how the more he wrote, the worse things were becoming. Why is this? Although he and Tessa were at cross purposes on Gchat, Adam felt reassured by the volume and animation of their repartee. There was so much going on! The absence of intimacy was disguised by frenetic rounds of connection.

The context: Adam is staying in Tessa's apartment while she is on a business trip. They had an argument and now, the following day, they use Gchat to reconcile. When Adam shows me the transcript of their conversation, he points out how comforting it was to him that his “voice” overlapped with Tessa's.

Most reassuring of all is when Tessa explicitly draws him close:

TESSA:
It must be weird being in my apartment without me, and wearing my tank tops.

ADAM:
I didn't see your name
on them. I have purchased a gift for you at
the clothing store on Copp Street. Very hip.

TESSA:
Personalized shirts went out of style just as I got *some* bit of breast that would have sexily shown my moniker. A gift! Which store? Copp's Closet? . . .

ADAM:
Did you mean to bold the word “some”?

TESSA:
Yes.

ADAM:
I want to kiss you.

TESSA:
Me too.

ADAM:
So kiss you.

TESSA:
I did.

ADAM:
Hot. . . . Yes weird to be in your place without you. I love it though. It truly reflects your spirit, taste. I am awed and obsessed by your books. Mind.

Adam explains that in this last line he is trying to equate Tessa's books and mind because she worries that she is “not as smart as the people writing the books she owns.” But at his words, Tessa becomes defensive: “Mind and books are sadly not equated.” Adam reassures her: “Allegedly. I want to type/talk forever love.” This time, at his attempt to reassure, Tessa moves to cut the conversation off. She replies: “I'll let you go.”

In this exchange, when Tessa feels insecure in the face of Adam's overabundance of praise, she ends the conversation and then adds a thought to reassure herself. After cutting Adam off to say good-bye, Tessa tells him that she is going to “sit outside to read for a bit. I really miss reading for a couple of hours, or um, half-hour stretches.” He has made her anxious about her reading. So she makes sure to say that she is
going to go read, but qualifies her statement, defensively. It's been hard to read. Her work makes it difficult. She has to do it in short bits.

Adam says that this exchange shows him and Tessa “at their best.” He says that they are “sharing,” “supporting each other,” and “aware of each other's needs.” What Adam doesn't mention is that the conversation also shows Tessa turning away from him when he touches on a subject that threatens her. And when this happens, Adam doesn't retreat, but doubles down and says something Tessa probably does not believe: that he equates her mind with the brilliance of her books. If Adam had Tessa before him, in person, would he have seen her pull away, in retreat, her gaze withdrawn?

T
he relationship ends when even the “better Adam”—with his crafted email and texting—cannot be empathic enough to meet Tessa's standard. In a final telephone call, Tessa tells Adam that she needs more.

The call leaves Adam feeling bereft and then angry. He writes Tessa an email to tell her that what she is asking for would destroy any relationship. “I said that when she doesn't get what she wants she's petulant and childlike. Which is damn true. . . . But I didn't call her and say, ‘Hey, I want to talk to you about this.' Why didn't I level that charge face-to-face?”

Adam begins to answer his own question. He says that when he wrote his angry email, he could imagine Tessa receiving it instantly but had some protection from her response. When she did respond, by text, she told him he was wrong and laid into him. Adam cannot bear to look at that text. He only says, “She responded with something pretty brutal.” He faced those cutting words on the screen but had not been willing to see her in person, perhaps saying such things.