Textual Pet Peeve

I know to most, I’m probably making much ado about nothing, but I have had the same kind of thing happen to me over and over and over and over and over again. And if I were alone, I would just keep it to myself and think that maybe it was me, because as we all know, my picker has seen better days.

If you read this regularly, you know that I have these peaks and valleys of dating. Some months I do it, other months (like this one), I’m a recluse.

But the reason why I always give up on dating turns out to be the same reasons over and over again. Like I said before, at first, I was convinced my man picker was broken, but now I’m more convinced that the men themselves are broken.

And since I decided a long time ago that I was not going to be the fixer of all men broken, I find it way easier to just walk away. I had to walk away from someone I cared a lot about just this week and although it broke my heart a little bit, I’m just not going to be a doormat for anyone to use when they have a need for me and to just forget about when something or someone else comes up.

But back to the texting. I feel like it’s just common courtesy to promptly respond to a text conversation that you started. I get it that people are busy and people have jobs that they aren’t supposed to text at, but if you had the time to send a text that says, “good morning, how are you?” then you shouldn’t send that text unless you have the time to have a short conversation.

To me, texts are not very different from phone calls. You wouldn’t call someone just to put them on hold. And if you do, you are either an automated telephone solicitor or an asshole. So why would you send someone a text when you don’t have the time to respond? It just seems rude to me.

Now, if I send a text that says, “good morning, how are you?” and you don’t respond for three hours, I’m ok with that. I get it that people are busy. But if you do respond after three hours with “I’m good, how are you?” And I say, “fine, are you working?” Why are you going to wait five hours to respond and then not even address the last question? Why would you completely change the subject or even worse, send a random goodnight text??

You haven’t talked to me all day. Why are you telling me goodnight? Maybe something like, “my day was so busy, I hate that we didn’t get a chance to talk” would be more effective. What all those gaps in text time say to me is that whoever is messaging me just has me in some sort of text rotation. He’s just going through his list of females trying to see which one is going to bite.

And what’s even worse than that is the late night text. I don’t know what a man could possibly want at midnight-thirty besides sex. He doesn’t want to go out for drinks. If he knew me better he would know I’m sleeping at that time and like I said about texting is like a  phone call… if you wouldn’t ring my phone at that time of night, why is it ok for you to text me at that time of night? If we are friends, cool. All the rules go out the window, but if you are pretending like you are trying to woo me, those things do the opposite.

Like I said, I’m not alone in this. This seems to be happening across the board. And it’s not just men. It’s women too. It’s not just straight people, gay people suck at texting too. So I’m just going to drop a few simple rules that you can cut and paste into your notes section of your phone so you can refer back to it at a later date just in case you are one of those terrible, inconsiderate texters…

1. If you don’t have time to reply to a text over the course of the next 4 minutes, don’t send one at all.
2. If you are busy, but you have someone on your mind, just tell them that. Ex: “Hey you, I was thinking about you. I don’t have time to chat right now, but I wanted to let you know. I’ll text later.”  (see how easy that was, feel free to copy and paste)
3. If you do leave somebody hanging all damn day before you get back to them, don’t pretend it didn’t happen. Offer an apology or at least acknowledge that you did it. Otherwise, you look like a complete and utter dickhole. “Hey, I meant to text you back three hours ago and life happened, my bad.”
4. If you didn’t text first, it’s ok to not text back immediately. You don’t actually have to text back at all… ever… if you don’t feel like it.
5. If you are getting to know someone, texting after 10pm without them asking you to is just plain rude. And quite frankly, everybody knows that there’s only one thing going down after 10pm… and it ain’t the price of gas.
6. Just for the fun of it, I’m going to go ahead and add dick pics to the mix. I personally don’t mind getting them (I’m making a dick collage), but a lot of people do. So if you insist on sending your man parts around the world, at least give the receiver the opportunity to say yes or no. Don’t just send a picture of your junk.

That’s pretty much it. I know this sounds like a negative rant. Maybe I’m on a roll this week. Maybe my fuse just burned out. I’m not sure. And if you have anything to add to this textual pet peeve conversation, feel free to drop your insights in the comments!