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Thx 4 Nthng

When texting attacks: a Valentine’s Day special edition.

by Natalie
posted on January 28, 2008

Credits: Zela Lobb

Technological advancement doesn’t always make for the betterment of mankind. As was the case with the Manhattan Project, the introduction of text messaging has had its share of catastrophic results. And so, it is with the hope that I might educate even one person about the dangers of “texting while dating” that I offer up this cautionary tale.

It all started over a drink at Place Pigalle with my new friend Riley. When Riley arrived, I saw he was wearing his wedding ring—an accessory that had been conspicuously absent the first time I’d met him. Where were you when I needed you? I thought, suddenly as mesmerized by the little band as a guy who’s just noticed that his coworker got a boob job. Having had a crush on Riley from the start, I’d proposed this drink as part of an adult attempt to pursue a platonic relationship with him.

“What are we drinking?” he asked. While waiting for Riley to come back with our Pinot Noir, I happened to catch the eye of a cute guy lounging near the pool table in back. He held my gaze and then gave me a little nod of acknowledgement that sent a shiver of excitement through me. Riley returned with our drinks and reached over to give me a friendly squeeze on the arm. “It’s great to see you!” he said. I smiled distractedly and found myself wishing there were some sort of universal “We’re just friends!” hand gesture—like the one people do for “Check, please”—that I could use to alert Mr. Head Nod that my drinking buddy and I weren’t a couple. Riley and I traded stories about our weeks before he excused himself to take a call from his boss. I seized the opportunity to brazenly make more eye contact. Amazingly, Head Nod took it as a sign to come over.

“You do realize En Vogue is in town at this very moment,” he said, by way of an opening. I laughed, charmed by his use of the Oracle convention concert as a pick-up line. It was reassuringly dorky—I’d learned the hard way that a smooth come-on never leads to anything good. “I’m dying for their autograph, so if you know anyone… ” he continued. “I’ll see what I can do,” I demurred. He laughed and then cut to the chase. “Was that your boyfriend?” I assured him that Riley and I were just friends. “Well, in that case, my name’s Seth,” he grinned. I quickly got the scoop: He worked in the nonprofit sector; had studied international relations at Princeton; spoke Italian; and loved Little Star. Every detail lit up in my mind like the correct answers on a Family Feud board—the more I found out about him, the more I felt like the night’s big winner.

Just as we had gotten to the topic of travel, Riley returned. “Sorry about that,” he said. Riley and Seth exchanged niceties before Seth stood up to go. “Listen, can I call you sometime?” he asked. Riley pretended to absorb himself in the beer menu, and I gave Seth my number. “Well, look at you!” Riley teased after Seth had left. I blushed, wondering whether married men were to single girls as dogs were to single guys—a “come hither” invitation to the opposite sex.

On my way home from the bar, I received a text from an unknown number. “Hi Natalie. It’s Seth. Let’s hang out soon.”

“Absolutely,” I wrote back.

“Keep me posted on that autograph,” he responded.

The next night, I went to bed early. In the morning, I awoke to discover another text from Seth, this one sent the night before at 11:30 p.m.: “You out tonight, Natalie?”

“Bad sign, right?” I asked the girls at dinner that evening, holding up my phone for evidence.

“It would be one thing if he called you the next day and pulled the ‘I don’t need to play games’ confident thing with a dinner invite, but to text you the next night, and with that message? How old is he?” Sia asked. “It sounds like a booty call.” I could tell by her tone that she suspected he may still be in college. “I’m just going to ignore it and hope he calls in a couple of days to ask me out,” I said, wishing it to be true.

When I still hadn’t heard from Seth four days later, I decided to throw him a bone. “No luck on the autograph, but I’m not giving up,” I wrote, as if to say, “Hey, we both know you messed up with that late-night text. Bygones. Now give me a call, and maybe we’ll end up telling this story at our wedding—how we almost didn’t get together because you nearly blew it.”

He wrote back right away. “Nice. How about Billy Joel?” Enough with the Oracle jokes, I thought, annoyed. I decided to be direct: “Maybe put the autograph collection on hold and focus on asking me out?”

“Aggressive,” he wrote back. “Whatcha got tomorrow?” Between “aggressive,” “whatcha” and yet another invitation issued by text, I knew the possibility for recovery was growing slimmer by the second. Still, at this point I was becoming addicted from a sociological perspective: The guy went to Princeton, for crying out loud. Could he really be missing the cues I was sending? Perhaps I was just one of many text recipients in his life, I theorized, and, like Priceline, he continued to send out offers and only noticed when one was accepted? “Plans with friends tomorrow night. But if you ever want to meet for a drink, give me a call,” I responded definitively.

The next night, I was grabbing a bite with the girls at Tortilla Heights when I received another text. “Are your plans the party kind?” Seth had written. “Just don’t respond. It’s the only way he’ll learn,” Jules said. Though she’d taken to discussing Seth as though he were a puppy, I was inclined to agree. Still, I always prided myself on calling people back—it was just common courtesy. I could imagine the way he would tell it to his friends if I never got back to him: Chicks, man. They’re nuts. This girl told me to ask her out, and then when I did, she ignored me. “When did it become old-fashioned to expect a guy to call?” I asked the girls, thinking a phone call had become the modern-day equivalent of bringing a girl flowers.

“Quality guys call to make dates,” Sia said. “There’s an entire subspecies of man out there that has evolved in response to the text-messaging phenomenon. Whereas before, you would have safely avoided them due to the fact that they’re either too immature or too lazy to ask you out, the accessibility of texting has offered them a loophole.”

“He seemed so promising,” I sighed. That night, my phone rang at 2:30 a.m., waking me. It was Seth. I didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a message.

The next night, I received another text: “Wanna meet for a drink tonight?” I erased this latest text from Seth, knowing it would precede erasing his name from my phone. I might have at least considered his invite if he hadn’t drunk-dialed me hours earlier. Before I made his number once again unidentifiable from any other, I decided to do a funereal recap of the messages that had accumulated in my inbox in the time since we’d met. Upon review, I noted that Seth, in his own way, had grown textually: going from asking what I was doing to naming what he’d like to do. Some might call that progress, I thought, and yet, I wanted nothing to do with it.

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