I want a boyfriend who will text me daily. I’ve always felt that way, but as I’ve matured, I’ve realized that maybe that was a bit unreasonable. However, I recently date a guy who literally NEVER texted. As in EVER. Here’s what that was like and why I won’t do that again.
- Talking on the phone was awkward at times. Since I like being in touch with the person I’m dating on a daily basis, it sucks not to have text as the main communication method. Don’t get me wrong, talking on the phone and hearing each other’s voices is awesome, but I don’t want to do that all the time. It feels impractical.
- On the other hand, emailing is boring. I like texting because everyone always has their phones on them. Yes, people check their emails on their phones, but it just doesn’t feel as cool to send someone funny dog memes on their email. Am I alone in this? This guy and I never emailed each other, and so that further made it weird for me to start using email as our way to communicate.
- I missed him when we weren’t in touch. Although we went on dates once or twice a week, the rest of the time we didn’t really chat. There was a phone call here or there just to confirm dates or cancel them, but nothing in-between. I found that I really missed him and it would’ve been nice to “check in” via text.
- I couldn’t test our textual chemistry. I’m all about connecting with someone on different levels. There’s the real-life date connection, of course, which is the most important one. But there’s also textual connection. It’s weird if real chemistry is there but textual chemistry isn’t, or vice versa. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell if we had that texting connection or not because he never texted.
- We missed out on cute and funny moments. Without texting, we couldn’t have those spontaneous late-night chats where we discussed the meaning of life or shared a LOL at random things. It was sad because I felt like we missed out on experiencing that. I also missed receiving those “good morning” texts that would make me feel special.
- I didn’t trust him. After a while of him insisting that he hated texting so much and never did it, I started to wonder if he was being completely honest about it. I couldn’t help wondering if he was just using this as an excuse so we didn’t have to talk a lot.
- I realized I’m addicted to my phone. Yikes. This experience of not being able to text the guy I was dating made me realize how much I use my phone on a daily basis, and how lost I felt when I wasn’t able to use it to text him. This wasn’t cool and made me try to put some distance between myself and my phone, which was so hard. But back to the guy.
- It made me feel awkward. Once, when I got the venue of our date wrong, I had to call the guy. He didn’t answer because he was in a meeting and I couldn’t leave a text because he dreaded texts so much. I hated that it was so hard to reach him at times! Other times, knowing that if I had to ask him something important I’d have to pick up the phone or wait to see him in person frustrated me to no end.
- I felt rejected at times. Sometimes I couldn’t help sending the guy a text but he always refused to reply. It was so awkward because the texting channel was completely closed off. It felt like a bit of a diss sometimes, to be honest. Even though I knew he didn’t like texting, it still felt like rejection and made things complicated. I realized I have texting needs and this guy just wasn’t satisfying them.
- It wasn’t liberating. At first, the thought of not texting was liberating. I thought how cool it would be not to have to check if he’d read my messages or not. Meanwhile, I was under the same amount of stress. Plus, finding ways to make up for us not texting was even more stressful. Not being able to text hampered our communication.
- Thankfully, it taught me some important things. There were some important lessons that I gained from this experience, so it wasn’t all bad. It made me realize that sometimes I use text chats to talk about serious topics because I lack confidence. Sometimes I want the comfort of hiding from behind a screen. It was good to interact with this guy because it pushed me out of that comfort zone and made me a better communicator. That said, I still love my phone.
