"Text me back: a love story" is a quote from Melissa Broder's series of personal essays, So Sad Today, seems to be frighteningly descriptive of our communication habits in the relationships of the millennial generation. With us relying heavily on texting to make plans, get to know one another, and generally all sorts of interactions we have with each other, we expect it to be reliable, right? With such an easy form of communication and a QWERTY keypad constantly at our fingertips, you'd think that's a step in the right direction for communication, right? Wrong.
Texting has given us so much more to stress about, don't even try to pretend like you've never asked your friend's opinion on a text you were about to send. And as soon as you don't get a text back, you pick apart the conversation and try to see where you went wrong; what made him stop liking you. And because we've become so reliant on texting people, we're not focusing on the real life communication aspect, which does still exist, even if we're putting it on the back burner and favoring familiar little green and blue bubbles. But, of course, texting people has given us this sick, strange power to ignore each other. But you're not ignoring each other, that's the beauty of it, you're just "busy." And that's what'll happen; you'll turn into an endless cycle of "busy" until you just give up. This is a modern day falling out, and the scary part is, it's completely normal nowadays.
We're constantly worrying ourselves making sure everything sounds okay on our end, or maybe they're just not reading it right, or maybe we're not, either. And then there's always the dreaded, "read (insert time here)." Call me old-fashioned, but if someone doesn't want to talk to me, I want to know, I want them to have the guts to be able to tell me that instead of just ending communication with me. The comfort of us staying behind our screens makes it so much easier to just pretend we never existed. And that's what's ruining our relationships with each other, the ease of being "busy" and never hearing from one another again, it's gotten to the point where the term "ghosting" was even coined specifically to describe it.
And there's so much room for miscommunication because we're not getting the full effect of the communication, only what we're perceiving it as. More often than not we're expecting one worded answers to mean anger or annoyance when in actuality, sometimes that person actually is just busy, or they don't know what to say, because there's such a pressure to text back if you want to keep someone in your life, it's this sickening urgency almost. Late spoken word author, Marina Keegan, describes it in her poem, Nuclear Spring, perfectly.
Now, why does all this matter? Because it's only going to get worse. We're only one generation - think of how much worse it's going to get when we have kids, or they have kids. We can't even figure out what to talk about on dates now because everything's on our Facebook profiles, it's like there's nothing even worth sharing anymore, imagine 50 years from now? We're basically never going to get to know each other on an intellectual level because we're beginning to forget the importance of it.
Is there any way we can stop it? Maybe not as an entire generation, but one by one, we can make the effort to put our phones down once in a while to engage in actual face-to-face conversation with actual people. We can't keep masking our feelings and problems with emojis, that's what facial expression and tone are for, remember to use those, too.
