I May Not Text You Back

I don’t think I’m meant for constant availability. And neither are you.

When my husband and I first started dating, he took forever to reply to my texts. Each time, I naturally assumed he had died. My mind painted canvases filled with the most macabre events: him being pushed onto subway tracks; gruesome bicycle pile-ups in Central Park; a bear escaping the zoo and finding its way to his office. Somehow even more upsetting was the idea that maybe he just wasn’t that interested and a break-up loomed near on the horizon.

Reality is so boring compared to what doom our cute little minds can contrive. Turns out, he just wasn’t looking at his phone. As he put it, any time spent away from his phone meant he was engrossed elsewhere, fully present in another setting. This imagery started replacing the more blood-spattered places my mind went. Instead of assuming he was being held up in a bank heist, I tried to imagine him absorbed in a conversation with a friend, or caught up in a flow state at work. I drew great comfort at the thought of him being fully present with a delicious cup of coffee, or even just puzzling through a passing idea.

As the writer Rega Jha says, “To expect instant responses from anyone is to hope for them to never be absorbed in their own present. Could any hope be less loving?”

Could any hope be less loving?

***

My first fraught experience with texting came the summer before tenth grade, when I returned home from camp. With the phone numbers of new friends and two whole red-blooded males at my disposal, I spent the rest of August sending smiley faces and swapping Switchfoot lyrics back and forth, giddy with a hunger I couldn’t name. Our texting was aimless and relentless, desperate in its pursuit of continued closeness outside the blurring confines of camp.

The catch: my parents’ phone plan limited me to 50 texts per month. Given and received. This was the era of flip phones and internet that could only be accessed through fuzzy dial-up connections. In a blaze of indignation, unfettered by any sense of self-control, I blew through my limited text allotment and racked up a phone bill so high, my parents threatened not to send me to college.

It was my first foray into the realization that communication could be treated as a commodity. Something precious and costly. And—with my phone privileges revoked—something that could be taken away.

Later down the road, once I traded my flip for an iPhone and could text whenever and whomever to my heart’s content, I found myself bound by a new restraint. I left missives unanswered, piling into heaps I could never quite dig myself out of. I became plagued with perfectionism, choosing to ignore messages if I didn’t have the wittiest banter at the ready or a gift-wrapped piece of sage wisdom to address a friend’s problem. My words became something I dared not give away too freely, for fear of them being found wanting. Or worse yet, I worried about being punished for sending the wrong thing, or even too much of the right thing.

By the time I could muster up something of a sufficient response, days or weeks or even months had passed, so I would pair it with guilt-ridden, prostrate excuses and pleas for forgiveness. “Soooooo sorry I’m just now getting back to you. I was taken captive by a band of rogue pirates and am so behind on texts. Forgive me!!!!!”

I still find myself with these tendencies, though instead of being slowed down by the pursuit of a perfect response, I’m slowed by my own self. By my own limited reserves of energy and inability to spread myself as far and wide as I’d like. Some of the people I love most in the world and want to hear from every day get left unanswered for a week. These days, the few people I can text every day are: my mom, any friend in true crisis, and my aforementioned husband, who may send something wonderful and time-sensitive like “Can we get pizza tonight?”

I don’t think I’m meant for constant availability. And yet I still feel a hot shame when I remember all my unanswered emails, missed phone calls, and messages marked unread. Once, after leaving a text unanswered for a few hours, a friend shot back: “I can tell you don’t have time to talk to me, but you could at least reply.” Gut punch. While being a good communicator is undeniably important—I believe it’s one way to show love and attention—this guilt feels too manufactured by the digital age. The smartphones in our pockets make us instantly reachable at all hours, but I’m not on board with feeling entitled to another person’s precious moments and finite time, just because they can technically answer.

Another friend, who knows my tendency to respond slowly, included this at the end of her most recent text: “Please feel no obligation to respond quickly. That fake urgency we sometimes feel was cooked up in Silicon Valley anyways. Whenever you reply, I’ll know it was the right time.” Pure grace.

There is so much beauty when we allow breathing room between responses. When we’re intentional and thoughtful with our words. When we treat texts more like snail mail letters than rapid-fire transactions. We can let our thoughts simmer, noticing what rises to the top, wrestling and reflecting through life without having to immediately capture it in characters and emojis. We can give others permission to cast their attention elsewhere, toward worthy pursuits in their own tangible realities. Unhurried texting shows us the difference between reachability and presence. At times, it helps us to know when connection is actually needed. At other times, it allows us to hope our loved ones’ silence just means they are absorbed elsewhere, engrossed in the fullness of their lives.

Could any hope be more loving?