Navigating Textspectations

In my rulebook for surviving a New York City summer, buses are a must. I would much rather stand on the corner across from my apartment praying to catch a wandering breeze, than be stuffed in the subway station, sweaty forearms stuck to the front flap of my bag. I’ll admit, this is the first full summer I’ll spend in the city, but after moving into an AC-less apartment during the hottest week of last year, there are some lessons I learned quickly. Then-- between carless furniture shopping and seemingly unending orientation activities-- I didn’t have the privilege of time. So, the underground lines were generally more practical for day-to-day travel. But now that I do, at least for now, I am more than willing to spend some of my excess making my journeys more pleasant.

But there is another, frankly more fascinating reason I prefer to take the bus. Service is spotty on the subway lines. Conversations over text suddenly require strategy and precise timing. You have to plan ahead. So, you'll send your text right when you arrive at the first stop. Maybe the person responds while the train is en route to the one after. (That’s perfect). You send your next text as the train begins to slow down. But what if the person is an unusually fast typist? Or, maybe they were already open on your conversation thread? And as soon as your message comes through, they decide this is the perfect moment to tell you they are still completely in love with you even though you live in a different country. And it is as you finish reading what they’ve said that you lose service in a tunnel below Lexington Ave, in a subway car that will get delayed between stops for twenty minutes. Maybe, this has happened to me.

The truth is that I am a shitty texter without all the hurdles. A lot of us have been there— you see a message, you plan to respond to it later because your current circumstances are just not ideal for that conversation, you forget to, enough time passes that you are embarrassed to respond at all, and eventually you grovel— it just so happens that I frequent this place. My friends would call me a regular. But I regret every trip I take to this communication limbo, and fear I will bump into the ghost of some frat boy past who is “just too busy” to get back to a girl he swore he’d “really like to get to know” when they were tangled between his bare mattress and childhood comforter.

So what is wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be able to change this behavior I am so intimately aware of? I reason with myself that if I don’t expect others to respond to my messages in a timely fashion that they will not expect it of me. But, of course, that is not how expectations work.

A couple of years ago, I lost a few good friends, and great people, because of my constant trips to ghost town. I was about a year out of high school, and just beginning to emerge from my Covid-19 induced stunt as a physical and digital recluse, and my girl group from junior and senior year was planning a reunion on the dance floor. A series of conversations occurred without my knowledge that resulted in the girls deciding they would rather go out without me. They were upset that I hadn’t meaningfully reached out to them in over a year. They hadn’t reached out to me either, but I had just assumed they were caught up, as I was, in the new life they found outside of high school corridors. They were, but the three of them had stayed close and in touch. I cannot say if I am to blame for losing contact— too much time has passed— but I do know I broke an expectation they had, and maybe if I had sent them a text when I passed by the places in Los Angeles we shared memories, we would not be strangers today.

I’ve mended my relationships with those girls. We probably won’t be inseparable ever again, but I will go out of my way to see them when we are in the same city. Still, I wonder if I was in the wrong. And I wonder if I will ever be able to be the person that everyone I know could depend on to answer a text immediately, if their life depended on someone doing so.

I am sitting at a restaurant on the corner of E 70th Street and 2nd Avenue. In between bites of goat cheese and tomato salad and sips of sauvignon blanc, I’ve been responding to the flood of texts that rolled in when I finally got back to all my friends in the city that have been waiting for me to get back from California. As they tell me about new relationships and the joys of travels I didn’t know they were taking, I feel like I understand why people have so many textspectations. (I should put a patent on that word). When you meet someone you feel like you can be yourself around— even when it is just during hushed on-the-clock conversations and short walks to shared bus stops— you don’t want to lose the option of being yourself around them. You don’t want so much time to pass that spending time together requires a re-introduction. So, now, as I pretend to be the person who responds right away, I find myself reaching out to people that didn’t text me. I find myself asking them about their plans after graduation and the state of their coveted summer internships. And though this version of me, this aspirational masquerade, may not be sustainable, I can report back that it feels pretty good.

Signed,

A New Romantic