Scaring Men by Text Message

Text messaging is way more
complicated than you would imagine!

I, like many people, communicate a lot by text message. I also have some friends who I only seem to communicate with via Facebook message, and a very few friends with whom I will actually have a Facebook chat. I think I have mentioned before that I try to do most things very efficiently, and messaging is no exception. When I receive a text or Facebook message I will respond immediately, unless it is something I need to think about, in which case I will respond that I need to think about it and get back to the person. I know that I am outside the norm in responding right away to messages, because I know lots of people who don't do this. Most people I know will respond in a few hours, and several respond much, much later.

I do not respond so quickly to messages because I am just sitting there with nothing to do, or because I am waiting by the phone for someone to message me, but rather because I like to take care of things as they come up. Maybe it's my OCD talking, but I feel better when I do not have lots of things to take care of. This tendency of mine is probably going to be a problem should I ever decide to date again.

I am back on the fence about dating. I thought for a while that I might try online dating, but I have all but totally lost my desire to do so. In fact, I have pretty much lost my desire to date period, and am thinking that growing old together with Netflix and a box of Girl Scout cookies (samoas) is starting to sound pretty appealing. However, should I have a frontal lobotomy one day without my knowledge and decide to date again, my text messaging protocol may cause me problems.

There is little that is less attractive when you start dating someone than if they seem overly clingy or overly attached, or if they seem like you are the focus of their life. While I am actually none of these things, I am afraid that immediate responses to a man's text messages would send him running for the hills. After all, someone I know very little is not going to know about my OCD, or my obsessive need to take care of things immediately, and if he does know about these things when I barely know him I will know he is a keeper because that will mean he has been reading my blog.

So, in an effort not to scare away my potential future dates, I think I might need to take a less immediate stance on responding to text and Facebook messages. That is, assuming that I would even be a Facebook friend with someone I had just started dating at all. If I were to friend a guy I had just started dating, then I would not be able to write about my dating experience on this blog, because I post daily blog updates to Facebook. Although something tells me that were I to meet a man I really really liked, I probably would not use our dating experiences as blog fodder.

Anyway, I am guessing that if this future potential date were to always receive an immediate response from me whenever he messaged me that he might make the assumption that I had no life and was way too available. The problem is that if I wanted to change this behavior I would have to be super conscious of it, and plan it all out, and basically engage in game playing, which I do not like to do in relationships. I can only imagine how crazy I would drive myself, but I am imagining that the "No wire hangers" scene from Mommie Dearest would probably pale in comparison to the level of crazy I could bring to the table.

So I guess trying to change my natural response pattern may not be the ideal option. Still, I do think the way I respond puts me at a disadvantage, because it seems that the person who needs to send the next response but has not yet done so holds all the power in a messaging exchange. During the interim period between when your message is sent and he responds, you can drive yourself all kinds of crazy, particularly if his response takes a long time. As of late, I have tended to attract the men who take a very long time to respond, and the longer the interim the crazier I become. I can critique everything about the message I have sent, even if the message was a sentence of, like eight words.

Now, maybe everyone else doesn't drive themselves crazy while waiting for a dating partner to respond to a text message, and it is just me over here, needing to be committed to the loony bin. Since I tend to get stuck on ideas that are bothering me it is hard to tell sometimes if my feelings are "normal." If the person responds in a reasonable amount of time I am fine, but it is these guys that let texts wait for hours on end that make me nutty. I usually take this behavior to mean that they are probably just not that interested, but, you know how it goes—as soon as you have decided that someone is not really interested in you, and you are accepting it and moving ahead, they will do something to indicate that they actually are interested, resetting your crazy button so you can start pondering things all over again.

I have to make sure that I don't end up like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist!

Do you see why I am not to enthused about dating? It is almost as much fun as waiting in line at the DMV, except when you wait in line at the DMV, you at least have the hope that your driver's license picture will turn out to be spectacular. Anyway, text messaging and Facebook messaging are definitely things that have complicated dating in the past ten years. When last I dated, back before 2002, we didn't do these things to communicate. You just called each other, and if someone got really motivated and fancy they might send the other person a card. Now you have to worry about texting and the messages your texting behavior sends, and other unpleasant stuff like that.

I guess I will just have to find a guy who is okay with my compulsive texting behavior, because, as I said earlier, if I have to modify said behavior then my head will spin around like Linda Blair's did in The Exorcist. While I think the hunt for this mythical man might last longer than Schindler's List, not having my head rotate at odd angles will be totally worth it!

Text messaging image courtesy of http://betterateverything.info/how-to-send-a-text-iphone