Okay, So You Get This Text Message…
“Oh so you’re around”
No punctuation. No Emoji. No gif.
What the actual fuck.
You’re in your bed, agonizing. Has it been 5 hours? You didn’t notice because you’re trying to INTERPRET THIS AMBIGUOUS TEXT. It could be: Mom and Dad are mad at me. It could be: Sam is flirting!? It could be: Oh God, Lee is not okay. You don’t know! You can’t decipher it. So, dangerously, you pick an intention (based on your own emotional state), and stick to it. You regard your assumption as truth. You’ve chosen some weird intention that must be true, having agonized until you 1. lost hope, 2. inflated your ego, or 3. picked the wrong fight. Holy crap. Texting is exhausting.
To contextual this essay, I have to say that texting is not even CLOSE to an ideal form of communication. Face-to-face -ALWAYS- is best, phone calls are a far second, FaceTime feels too new to rank (?) but probably falls somewhere between 1 and 2, email (I guess?) is third, and texting is somewhere at the way bottom of the communication totem pole, juuuust above Twitter. BUT texting is the form we use most often today, so despite it’s inherent flaws, I’m going to engage and find, within this flawed and popular communicative form, some quasi-soothing guide to textual sense-making.
Typically, we assume the answers to the agonizing internal questions I asked above to be simple. Yes, they’re mad at me. No, I am imagining the wink. Yes, ze feels bad. But, what if the answer is both? What if the fact that the message is ambiguous, means the text was meant to be read ambiguously?
I’ll say it again: it’s unclear because your friend, or lover, or parent, wants it to be unclear.
The grey area might just be the point. Instead of a cut-and-dry, black or white text-writing intention, the texter is trying to convey their multitudes of complex emotions, they’re hesitations and emotional states. Think about how you text. If you’re happy, you adjust your voice for that. If you’re mad, your texting voice responds to your anger. When you don’t want to let on what your emotions are yet, when you want the other person to squirm a little, to spend more time on the word or the thought tossed around, to wonder about you and your relationship, what you might’ve messed up on, what could happen between the two of you, what do you do? If it’s an emotionally important text, you write ambiguously. You cloud your text. You make it grey. You don’t accidentally put a heart emoji, or leave out an exclamation point, no — you use the power of suggestion on purpose. Other people are just like you in important ways; they’re emotionally evasive, thoughtful, and nervous. Maybe the reason you can’t tell is because the point of the message is not to be able to tell. The message is ambiguous. The writer wants you to read it as ambiguous.
Think about how FREEING that is! I can’t tell if s/he/they likes me? That’s because s/he/they doesn’t want me to be able to tell 100%! Sure, that may mean they’re waiting on it, they haven’t decided, or they’re anxious, but at any rate, they’re being elusive in a way that ALLOWS me to read multiple interpretations! Why assume that was an accident? Perhaps, s/he/they just don’t want to tell me, yet. An example: “Do you still have my number” is a text where the punctuation matters. “Do you still have my number?” is merely looking for information, “Do you still have my number!” is informing a layer of excitement or happiness to the message, while “Do you still have my number.” might passively aggressively mean you forgot to call. While part of this is looking at the context of the situation, the other part of it is realizing that without punctuation or emoji (which effectively works as punctuative emotional clue-ins) the message is purposefully being unclear. Read it that way. They might be playing with you a little bit. That’s the important thing to realize — they don’t want you to know what they’re thinking, it’s like a game, and that knowledge may be the most important clue-in of all. (Or perhaps they don’t have the capacity for clarity, which in itself, is another problem…I’ll write an essay on the art of written expression, next .)
Here are more texting tools to look at.
- Habit. What’s their normal text voice? I, for one, send emojis all day long and capitalize the hell of out of my emphasized words. What does your friend do? Are they a non-punctuation-when-content type? Are they a I-don’t-capitalize-the-first-word-ever type? Learn their language; know their normal; start with their control group, and move out from there. Of course your friend has a voice — learn it. Know them.
- What’s their regular voice? Think about the person you are closest to. You two don’t need emojis or punctuation. You two don’t need ANYTHING. When you read a text from this other person, you already know what they’re saying. You can practically HEAR their voice saying it. You know when they’re joking. You know when they’re egging you on. You know their speech. You know their voice, written or spoken. The two, I think, are not always so distantly related.
Okay, that’s all well and good — but you’re stuck with a hard one. She’s normally a smiley-face-emoji kind of person and she sends you a winky face after a-bad-inside-joke-about-geography-class text, which is slightly out of the norm, and she’s not usually concise with or in masterful control of her self-expression anyway, plus she responded in twelve minutes instead of fifteen but she didn’t ask a question so maybe the conversation is over but you really want to know if she likes you and, and, and… Yes.
It sounds ambiguous.
Read it that way. Ask her. Play dumb. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell what you’re trying to say”. “What do you mean, exactly?”, or my favorite, “It feels like you’re upset, or am I reading it wrong?” Ask. Just ask! Pretend you really have no idea. Say it in the way you need to say it. “Boy, are you saying we should go to the movies?” “Dad, it seems like you’re trying to say that I’m off the hook, but I really can’t tell over text”. “Sister, I can’t tell whether of not you’re saying I can borrow your bike” (but don’t really refer to your sister as ‘sister’ — that’s creepy). If you make yourself utterly clueless, most of the time, the other person will dumb their communications down for you. They want you to understand what they’re saying. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be saying it. If they’re mad, they want you to know they’re mad and that you messed up! Where’s the fun in being mad at someone who thinks they’re fine? If they’re flirting, they want you to know that, too! After all, it takes two to tango, and if one doesn’t even know you’re trying to dance, both of you will never make it onto the dance floor.
Look. We don’t have hours to spend agonizing our what 140 characters or less “is intended to mean”. Life is short. Friends, lovers, and parents are too valuable to lose over something like a written social media miscommunication. Learn how they text-talk. ASK them what they’re feeling if you can’t tell. And understand some words are meant to be read ambiguously. People are complex, three-dimensional multi-celled organisms. Maybe texting is not the ideal tool to encompass our emotional multitudes, but also, perhaps, we’ve been reading each other wrong.
