Text or Call?

Last year in Scotland I managed to snag several girls’ phone numbers (thank you). Yet, strangely, a disproportionate amount of them never called me back. As a personal policy I only obtain phone numbers from women with a good sense of humor, because I’m afraid if I court girls with overly serious demeanors my personality will drive them to homicide. So by the time I collect digits, it’s unlikely my weird version of flirting will frighten a girl off.

After another girl never returned my call, I mentioned the odd phenomenon to my flatmate. He balked. “You called her?” he asked, in much the same tone of voice as if I had asked her out by etching “WANT TO SEX YOU” on a brick and lobbing it through her window. According to my flatmate, directly calling a girl you just met is like a prelude to a Stephen King novel. Creepy and wholly inappropriate. (That is, unless you are planning to capture her.)

To arrange a first date you text. Texting is passive and elegant. Calling is verbal nudity. Whereas I thought, if a girl consensually gives her phone number (as opposed to me hiring a private investigator) then the proper and normal course of action is to followup a day or two later with a call. Therein, I say, “I enjoyed meeting you the other night and was wondering if you wanted to go get [sushi/liquor/laser tag/groping] sometime next week. Please give me a call back.” Generally with some glib signoff.

Incidentally, girls usually won’t answer an unknown phone number because for some reason they always assume it’s a serial killer. They let these mysteries go straight to message. (I always answer unknown phone numbers, because it could be the president, or Publisher’s Clearing House, or who knows what. To me unknown numbers are like getting packages in the mail.) I’m not complaining here about the wait-for-message system. I’m just saying that I like to leave messages in the first place. Afterwards, when the girl reviews the message, the protocol is to return the call to negotiate a time and place for me to buy her food.

Having discussed the issue with eight nationalities, three generations and at least two genders, I’ve decided to stick by my original procedural method. It seems to me that asking a girl out by way of text message is a pretty good way to electronically communicate a lack of testes. The girls I grew up with hail from gritty (yet good-looking) pioneer stock and aren’t likely to waste time on what is perceived as a male lacking the requisite confidence to dial seven numbers and speak into a plastic box. Such women conditioned me, and it’s hard to shake off a feeling of cowardly retreat when resorting to invitation-by-text.

However growing up in Oklahoma is effectively like being birthed in a time capsule, so I’ll leave some wiggle room for geographical preference.

The English, for instance, are by nature an indirect people. Frivolous eye contact and unsolicited anything are often perceived as preludes to mugging. Eventually all breeding south of Leeds will happen through online dating or getting blind drunk at parties and having sex in a broom closet. The concept of walking up to someone, introducing yourself and then asking them to dinner is baffling.

This to me remains one of the most fascinating mysteries about Britain: how can a people who are so unimaginably horny, so unapologetically shag-happy, be simultaneously the most indirect, subtle and reserved people on the planet? It’s not like they’re getting pregnant over there through complicated ladder climbing accidents.

But even in the case of the demure Britunculi, I suspect the issue is generational. I once dated an English girl (thank you) four years my senior, and recall no awkwardness in having telephone conversations whatsoever beyond the normal base-level awkwardness which pervades all of my chats like static. So I don’t think the issue is that the British or New Yorkers or Washingtonians prefer texts to calls, while those of us from warmer climates with loose gun control laws favor direct verbal communication. I think it largely boils down to if you were born before or after 1992. If you were born after 1992, you grew up with a cell phone. If you were born prior, cell phones grew up with you.

I did not have a mobile phone in middle school, and developed no texting-related communication skills at any point throughout. If I wanted to ask a girl out on a date I had to march right up to her, look her straight in the eyes, then walk right back to my desk and assure myself I never wanted to ask her out in the first place. Fear of full-on immediate rejection was part of the game.

In high school my parents gave me a mobile phone which resembled a sleek remote control, allegedly in case of emergencies. “Emergencies,” I would later discover, pertained to situations in which my father might have to actually leave his vehicle and enter the mall to come find me.

Dad himself retained an earlier generation of Neolithic mobile phone technology from the mid-nineties. Back then mobile phones were a sort of gray brick you held against half your face in order to contract cancer and talk about the latest Newhart episode. You even had to plug it into your car’s ashtray, too. They were mobile in so far as your car was. My dad bought one of these in 1994, which is something of a mystery as he neither answered it nor even turned it on until 2009. I think it’s entirely possible he bought it by mistake, thinking it was some kind of futuristic electronic Japanese brick.

If we wanted to talk to girls we had to call their house and ask for them. Then we would speak over the phone, which was forever associated with a particular house. In high school I dutifully brought my cell phone to school everyday, then promptly turned it off and stuck it in my locker. I only had twelve numbers in the damn thing, and the seven people I might actually want to speak to were sitting in the same room as me for the entire day anyway. Why turn it on?

I’m sure at some point towards graduation one of us realized that we could text for purposes other than logistics, though I don’t recall the exact brightline. Sometime around 2003 or 2004 texting became a fully integrated part of everybody’s social lives. (“Sexting” wasn’t even on the radar yet, because phones didn’t have cameras.)

Contrast my above experience, in which a generation learns how to be awkward and embarrassing in person or over the phone, with a generation which can communicate all things in a minimalist digital medium. If you look at people’s wrists you’ll notice that few born in the 1990’s or beyond (nor, for different and contemptible reasons, anyone from a country touching the Mediterranean) owns a watch. Why would they? If you are texting, sexting or emailing every eight seconds you are omnisciently aware of the time.

I understand the appeal of texting as a primary means of communication. Texting affords complete sovereignty of emotion. Over the phone your voice might quiver, you might bungle a word, you may be forced to respond to an ambiguous question without half an hour to craft your retort and text your friends for their input in a grand tele-pow-wow. In short, you may have to interact as an emotionally competent human being, right there, on the spot.

By the way, I am not saying that texts are universally bad or that I refrain from sending them. My phone plan has unlimited texting, for good reason. I just think it’s a cowardly way to ask women out on dates.

The rest of the time texts strike me as postcards for your phone, which are nifty. Texting in situations where you need a one-sentence answer to a question and don’t want to go through the etiquette of five minutes of “how are you” makes sense.

One of my Scottish friends and I text a lot, and it’s an easy and cheap way for us to stay in contact. And, more than anything, coordinating twelve people to go to a pub or movie, let alone orchestrate a drive by shooting or bank heist, is far more efficiently handled by a text message.

But when you’re first getting to know someone, I prefer the most direct and transparent methods. I want to hear inflection, and reveal my own. Take off the sunglasses of my emotions, so to speak.

Ask your dates out raw.

Thoughts?

Photo Credits: “Madeleine Brohan With Her Cell Phone, after Paul Baudry” CC  Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com; “Attractive Flatmate Texting in Bathtub,” by Teresa Woodall; “Texting, all Three” CC  Susan Sermoneta; “Siren Sexting Sailors, after Edward Armitage” CC  Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com;