Text communication is really hard. You would think it would be easy, but it’s not. You’d think it would be much easier than a telephone call. Easier than voice communication. In text, you can calm down. You can take a moment to think about what the other person has written. You can take your time to compose a reply. You can write an angry ranting screed and then delete it all, having gotten it out of your system.
More often than not, we’re just simply poor at reading and comprehending what another person has written. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Overwhelmingly, we don’t see the world as it is but instead see the world as we are. We don’t read the text as it is written, even though we think we do. We read it from our own perspective. This leads to texting past one another, having related but ultimately different conversations. This is more insidious than talking past one another. Because it was committed to text, we feel justified in claiming that we were unequivocally in the right.
It’s often not clear what the other person meant until we have read and reread, paused, stepped away, taken time, and then come back to reread it once again. In an in-person meeting or a telephone call, you can catch when the other person is talking past you. You have instant feedback.
In text, you miss all of that. It’s rather counterintuitive. Yet we often feel like text is just more pure. We don’t want to receive an audio message, and we sure as hell don’t want to answer a telephone call. Defaulting to text is not antisocial. It’s a way of coping with the overload of social interaction. You can prioritize conversations or channels.
This doesn’t mean that friendships (or even romantic relationships) are doomed to failure if they are based in text. Some of the most beautiful prose in the English language was the result of having to write letters to loved ones far away. No, it simply means that we must introduce variety when possible. We’ve got to pick up the phone. We’ve got to hear one another’s voice. We’ve got to hear up the signals that are lost when we don’t hear someone’s tone of voice.
I recently had a misunderstanding due to text communication. I didn’t know someone was sick, and they were very short with me. I was hurt, while they were confused as to why I would be hurt. They felt like I was giving them pressure, misunderstanding took root. We both got in our own heads and some real damage was done to the relationship. The path to fixing it is time and more communication. Yet it is easy to reach a point where we don’t want to try because of single-channel communication fatigue.
Mix up communication styles. Even if you’re long distance, if you’re asynchronous, add some voice, or if you’re all voice, add some text. Don’t make major decisions in friendships or relationships without ensuring that your message is understood and that you are understanding the message being communicated to you.