Her phone buzzes and she unlocks her home screen, careful as to not actually open the text. The message reads, "What's up? :)" It took him 15 minutes to reply, so naturally she waits at least the same amount of time to give him a response. She plans out what she is going to say and erases her message a dozen times. She shows it to all of her friends and once she gets the seal of approval, she hits send. This digital game continues for the duration of the entire conversation. The funniest part about the whole thing is that the guy on the other end of the phone most likely doesn't even put in 1/3 of the thought into his messages that she does. Even better is that she knows that, yet still over-analyzes everything, down to the last punctuation mark.
There are unwritten rules to texting that somewhere along the way were established for a purpose whose intention is unclear. We consciously obsess over things so minimal and insignificant and take it so far that we drive ourselves crazy. Here's an attempt to discuss all the texting "rules" per se that some boys may not even realize exist.
1. Reply Time
If you wait 30 minutes for a reply, then you have to wait at least that long to respond, if not longer. You can’t seem too eager or make it appear as though you were sitting watching your phone (which, let's be honest, you most likely were). You have to play it cool and beat them at their own game, even if they don’t even know it’s being played.
2. Double Trouble
“He double texted me,” is a common phrase heard amongst the female population. Getting two or more separate text messages within one thought is something girls become giddy over; however, you never want to be caught dead being the one to send a double text. You better thoroughly think about what you want to say before you press send, or else you might be regretting something you didn’t include.
3. Text Content
This is something you may not notice until you go back and reread your texts. You don’t want to look back and be embarrassed by your abundance of content that balances out by his lack thereof. You may be sending paragraph texts, but his 3-word responses seem to allude to a lack of interest.
4. Read Receipts
Everyone’s love/hate relationships with these are easily justifiable. You want everyone you text to have them, which is ironic because you won’t get them yourself. You must be careful with reads because although your clearly read text message with no reply gets the point across, people can take these for granted and become obsessive and overwhelming if you forget to reply. Also, don’t be that person who has their reads on and looks at a text but doesn’t actually open it for hours later. We all know the trick and are not amused.
5. Emojis
Clearly the simple :) :/ and :( weren’t enough in middle school, so now they offer hundreds of emojis to choose from. It’s important to pick the right one because that winky face can turn a message from cute to creepy in a nanosecond. Choose emojis that enhance the conversation because quite frankly, texting seems a little bland without them.
These are only five of the many things girls worry about when texting. You could be like me and choose to completely ignore all societal expectations of the texting world; however your friends will probably be like mine and lure you back to what they think is right. It seems a little juvenile that people are so concerned with what they say; texting is so vague and easily misinterpreted anyways. But no matter what, we’re all going to continue wasting disgusting amounts of time overthinking whether or not we’re staying within the unwritten rules of the wonderful world of texting.
