Periods: the overthinking texter’s worse nightmare

Picture this…you have plans to grab lunch with a friend but you realize the day you are way too busy to step away from your work for an hour. You don’t want to, but you decide that you need to text your friend to cancel on them, hoping they understand that this isn’t your first choice but it needs to be done.

So you draft a text. Something perfect and sincere and that conveys how apologetic you are. “Hey, so sorry that this is late notice but I’m super busy and don’t think I can make lunch today,” and then you quickly follow up with “how about another time?”

A few minutes later your phone pings to life with their response.

“okay.”

Did your anxiety just spike as much as mine did?

Maybe it didn’t but you can’t deny there is something daunting about receiving such a short text with a period. There is a curtness to it, an intentionality that causes my brain to short circuit trying to come up with all the potential reasons the person who sent me that text may be mad at me.

In reality, though — they might have just been saying “okay.” Okay as in, “Sure no problem” just using fewer words and ending a sentence grammatically with the correct punctuation. They think nothing of it, while my fellow overthinkers and I do mental gymnastics.

And if you think I’m being overdramatic, I’m not. Sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post have written articles about this phenomenon of how these pesky little periods cause way more problems than they should, and in many cases are intended.

This is something that has evolved with the technological era — presenting issues that wouldn’t have ever come up because of the fact that these digital conversations are in place of the verbal ones. What could be solved by the tone of voice and facial expressions is not left solely up to the receiver of the text to decipher — and when you are someone like me who reads too much into things that leads to some misunderstandings. I swear my friends are probably sick of me calling them, but it saves me the embarrassment of asking “Hey are we okay” only to find out that I was reading too much into things again.

As the video from Binghamton University pointed out, textisms are used explicitly to help rectify the disparity that comes from the lack of face-to-face communication. Many times I find myself purposefully splitting up text or removing punctuation to help contribute to the message I am trying to send. While I may not be as well versed in some of the hidden meanings of emojis as my 15-year-old sister, for example, the skull emoji is supposed to represent funding something really funny, I do know that things like adding in extra exclamation marks can make you sound less pushy or adding in a few laugh-crying emojis/a lol can make things sound less harsh.

I may be someone who prefers a phone call to texting, but many people aren’t in that boat — especially when a simple text may be more time conscious and direct. So for me, and your friends that are overthinking texters, switch out that period for an exclamation point. Or, maybe, just don’t punctuate at all.