Unlimited texts, limited social skills

Unlike you, I’ve never had an unlimited texting plan. My parents are under the laughable impression that texting is unnecessary and not something they should pay for. So I’ve been on a plan called “unlimited texting until Dad notices.” It took a couple years, but he did.

So now I am trying to limit myself to sending and receiving 250 texts a month. This might sound reasonable, especially when you consider all the things that most people in this world are forced to live without. But this means I can only send and receive eight texts per day.

That goes faster than you might think in my typical college-student life of simultaneously trying to make plans, impress people with my wit, fight with friends, begin relationships and end relationships. 

When I asked my friends to start getting in the habit of calling rather than texting me, my request was met with looks of bewilderment and confusion.

“So if I have something to tell you that I would normally send as a text,” one friend asked, “Should I just call you and say it and then hang up immediately?”

Despite such concerns, I didn’t really think cutting back on texting would be that big of a deal. For the first 19 years of my life I had never even heard of text messaging, and yet I had functioned almost completely like a normal human being. If I did without it then, I thought, there is no reason why I can’t get by just fine without it now.

Wrong. So wrong.

What I’ve come to realize is that, over the course of my texting career, I have actually developed an irrational, almost pathological fear of talking on the phone. If someone texts me a question and I have to choose between calling them or not responding, I will not respond and then later make up an unnecessarily outrageous lie about having been away from my phone for an extended period of time while occupied with a family emergency.

In the rare event that I do call someone, I find myself praying that the person won’t answer so I can just leave a message. If they call back later I let their call go to my voice mail, even if I am doing nothing but staring at a wall and feeling lonely, so that they can also just leave a message.

I expend an impressive amount of energy each day just trying to maintain these cycles of avoidance, hoping I can keep them all going until the issues that need to be addressed eventually either resolve themselves or become irrelevant, or until the termination of our lives as physical beings on this earth.

Cutting back on text messaging has revealed things about myself that have forced me to re-examine my life. All this time I thought what I wanted was a plan with unlimited texting. But maybe what I really want is a plan to help me re-learn basic conversation skills.