The Fault in our Texts: How Texting affects Relationships

When I met my college friend Sanya after 3 years, I asked her about how his partner was. To my surprise, she told me that she’d broken up with him a long time back.

I inquired why, but I did not get a satisfactory answer- just vacillations between “It didn’t feel like it used to” and “We weren’t meant for each other.”

A brief meandering through other topics, and she came back to talking of her breakup, “He anyway used too many emojis for my liking. Just looking at those gave me a headache” she said.

We talked of her career, her plans for masters in the US, and decided to revert to our own lives by the evening.

But I carried a gift back from her.

A question that was too rudimentary to ask her back then, but took concrete shape during my 40-minute metro ride from Rajiv Chowk to the Golf course.

Could it be that the way he texted played a role in affecting their relationship? 

The reason why I even accorded texting such importance was because of how almost instinctively she mentioned about his texting pattern being not to her liking, even when they’d been seeing each other for a while.

Obviously, it bothered her.

So I approached the wisest person I knew to get an answer to this question- Computer ji.

She listened to my questions patiently (don’t ask me why Computer ji is a she), and replied, “Beta, you’re partly correct. While it may not have worked out for them due to some reasons only privy to them, texting does play a role in how satisfied you feel in a relationship.”

How Texting Affects Relationships

When I started scouring for resources to understand how texting can affect relationships, I landed upon one conducted by Leora Trub, a psychology professor at Pace University who presented her research on the same topic at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association.

In her research, she found that whenever there is a "perceived similarity" in texting patterns, couples felt more satisfied in the relationship. 

Interestingly, what stood out in her research was that the frequency of texting did not matter as much as we believe. It was the similarity in how they communicated, irrespective of the medium.

It almost instantly reminded me of a couple I knew who were in a long-distance relationship, who barely texted each other, except on Sundays when both of them got relatively free.

And unlike in Sanya’s case, they were still together. 

Their quality of communication must have triumphed over the frequency. The similarity must have reigned over the distance.

But texts are agnostic. They can both be cupid or ruin your mental health (and relationship).

In a separate study by the same author, she found that texting can actually prevent you from having a meaningful relationship, if texting is solely used to mollify loneliness. 

Slowly, it started making sense why sometimes we barely receive a few texts from someone, yet decide that they’re not the right one for us. On the other hand, we are stuck in almost perpetual texting phases and situationships because the similarity in texting patterns makes us feel content to an extent.

If this is true, then those men apologising to their wives by almost serenading them with texts, have negligible effect. They are perhaps forgiven because their wives chose to forgive them, not because they said “I’m sorry” n number of times.

I soon started to discern which relationships worked and which did not with my newly acquired lens of texting rapport; and maybe, got a thread to work with in understanding what goes into the phrase “We weren’t meant for each other.”

So here’s a little task for you- Reach out to a friend you know isn’t as content in their relationship as before and ask them how they communicate with their partner.

Maybe, the fault is in the texts?