Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  For Ryan, the advantage of texting in a romantic context is that it allows you to hide in a sexy way. Now, as he considers WhatsApp, it is as though the designers of the technology didn’t understand its human purpose. At this point the conversation among the friends turns technical: This is a bad feature. Which phones and which apps have it? Which don’t? How can this feature be disabled? How can you work around it?

  It turns out that there is much expertise to go around once these clever twenty-two-year-old minds are concentrated on the problem. They end up concluding that to keep romantic texting alive, the best solution is to go “retro” in your technology. They want some version of “I didn’t get your mail” or “I was out when your call came in.” These kinds of lies have always been staples of romantic exchange. And these young people want technology to make space for them. Elaine thinks she has her worst problems solved by turning off her iPhone’s “read receipt” feature. This means that she can at least pretend not to have seen a text. “If I want to take my time responding, I can still say, ‘Oh, I put my phone down for a second—so sorry.’”

  Who Are You? Can Our Romance Be Efficient?

  Ryan worries that too much information takes the romance out of texting. I have dinner with nine San Francisco professionals in their late twenties who hold texting up to a different standard: Does it increase the efficiency of their romantic lives?

  Our dinner and the two-hour conversation that follows take place in a downtown conference room so that the participants can join as their workday ends. Most hold their phones during our meeting. A few put their phones on the table. One young woman begins dinner with her phone in her pocketbook, but when it vibrates she takes it out and announces that she will leave it on the table because she is more relaxed when she can see it.

  And phones are at the center of our conversation. At this meeting, the men complain that their girlfriends are always on their phones. The women complain that their boyfriends won’t take their eyes off their screens. They are certainly not alone. A recent survey reports that nearly half of cell-owning young people in serious relationships say that their partners have been distracted by their mobile phones while they were together. Callie, twenty-six, who works in sales for a large insurance company, has a boyfriend in the financial industry. Even at intimate moments, she says, screens are close at hand.

  My boyfriend drives me nuts. . . . He has four computer screens. So he is used to looking at everything going on all the time. . . . So he can actually listen to me and text other people at the same time. But because I can’t do that, I think he’s not listening and I’ll get so mad and be, like, “You’re not paying attention to anything I’m saying to you!”

  I ask Callie about the effects of these always-present screens on her relationship. She says it forces her to concentrate when she approaches her boyfriend. “I definitely don’t talk to him about nonsense because I need to make the best use of my time with him. Because if he is actually spending time listening, I’m making sure that I’m saying things that are actually worth saying.”

  What about the role of small talk in love? Talk about nothing at all? Callie makes it clear that her relationship does not have a lot of room for that. When she has face-to-face time, there is “just no nonsense.”

  Callie offers that sometimes she and her boyfriend find a place for “nonsense” on Gchat. Generally, her boyfriend has Gchat in one window on his screen while he keeps an eye on business in other windows. But sometimes, Callie says, she will just put her hand over his screen and fondly say, “Enough.” As she makes this gesture in the group, pantomiming her hand on his screen, her phone rings. Everyone laughs.

  Ray, twenty-eight, comments on what it’s like to have a relationship when you compete with screens: “I think the way we’re going, a lot of people are getting the feeling that even though the person they’re with is there, you don’t get the feeling of real connection. You just have information.”

  Kim is a college junior from New Jersey. Like Callie, she is frustrated by a boyfriend who is always on his phone. And she shares Ray’s concern that conversations in her relationship are mostly about information. It’s hard to make them about more because they are usually being interrupted by an incoming text. Her patience is wearing thin. These days, she says, “If me and my boyfriend fight and we are talking and he stops to text someone back, even if it is for two seconds, I’m, like, ‘What are you doing? I’m not good enough for you?’ I freak out.”

  Recently Kim’s boyfriend broke his phone:

  And these past couple [of] weeks, because he hasn’t had a phone, the interactions we have—even if it is a date night or lying in bed doing nothing, it’s so much better. I’m not trying to compete with a phone. It’s so much easier. It’s a lot more relaxing. It puts my mind at ease.

  Kim reflects on her conversations with her boyfriend before the broken phone: “He owns his own business . . . so that means he is constantly on his phone. So our conversation would be really small. It would be about nothing important. At dinnertime, it would be me saying, ‘Who are you texting?’ or ‘How’s your iPhone?’” Kim got used to a conversational regimen so restricted that for her, now, a “larger” conversation with her boyfriend means things as simple as talking about their day.

  Who Are You? Imposing Order

  The San Francisco twenty-somethings are always pressed for time. They work so many hours a week that they barely see their partners. It seems natural that when they talk about love and texting, they stress its efficiency. For others, what messaging, email, and texting can do is bring order and cool into the untidiness of relationships.

  In Taipei, a 2013 novel heralded as depicting the post-net sensibility, the lovers at the center of the story use technology to avoid the risks of real-time arguments. When they’re angry they agree to type to each other.

  Erin sat at the foot of the bed, facing away from Paul, who lay on his back with his MacBook against his thighs, and they communicated by email (they’d agreed to type, not talk, whenever one of them, currently Paul, felt unable to speak in a friendly tone) for around fifty minutes.

  Life tracks art. Some couples tell me they have their arguments online (usually on Gchat or instant messenger) so they can keep a record. One desired goal is to make the fights more “fair.” Some use “fight tracking” apps. Here, the idea is that gathering more data about the pattern of quarrels will help couples improve their relationships.

  Talia, in her early thirties, talks about how she and her partner used to work out their differences in online chat sessions. “What I like about chat for fighting is that I’m getting my case out and I’m sure I will be heard. When we argue face-to-face, I get so upset that I don’t remember what I said. . . . We were having these fights and it was destructive.” In online talk, she can collect her thoughts and leave a record. But after a while, she and her partner had second thoughts about the online quarrels. The method began to feel awkward and they wanted to return to what Talia calls a more “spontaneous” style of arguing. But they could not go back to how they had done things before. They knew they would miss the “accountability” of online chat with its data trail. They found a compromise. As soon as a conversation gets heated, they begin to videotape it. So now they have an archive of their “fights.”

  And our promise to each other is that when we feel we are in that destructive space, we stop, take a break, and continue that face-to-face conversation on tape. We take the value of what we used to get out of fighting by text and chat—that we had the record—and use it for face-to-face.

  Leaving a record makes both Talia and her partner feel safer. They won’t be misheard. They are trying to use technology to make their relationship—untidy as all relationships are—more tidy. In the language that I hear so much, their goal is to make the conversations of romance more efficient and controlled.

  But getting to know other people, appreciating them, is n
ot necessarily a task enhanced by efficiency. This is because people don’t reveal themselves, deeply, in efficient ways. Things take time to unfold. There is need for backtracking and repetition. There is a deepening of understanding when you have gone through the same thing twice, or more.

  Where Did You Go?

  In a stand-up routine on modern romance, Aziz Ansari asks people to raise their hands if they have ever just stopped texting someone when they were not “into” the relationship. A theater of hands goes up. Then he asks people to raise their hands if that is how they’d like someone to convey to them a lack of continuing interest. There are no hands. There is a lot we accept as the new normal that we don’t like at all.

  Sloane, a college junior, went on only four dates with Evan, but each one lasted more than five hours. Sloane felt they had that all-elusive “chemistry.” On their fourth date, Evan initiated a serious conversation, a discussion of what each of them wanted from the relationship. Sloane says, “I told him that I was happy to be with him as long as we both enjoyed each other’s company. He seemed relieved and pleased with my response . . . but he made it clear that he didn’t want to use ‘labels,’ which was an unusually cliché thing for him to say.”

  Sloane left the conversation about “no labels” feeling excited. She thought that she and Evan were at the beginning of something important. But then, she didn’t hear from Evan for a few days. Usually he would have sent her a text or several, just to check in. Finally, on a Saturday morning, as she was just home from a run, Sloane looked at her phone to check the time and saw the green message bubble containing an excerpt of a text she had missed. Scanning the message, she registered the phrases “amazing woman,” “wish you all the best,” and “not the best time.”

  I put the phone down as though it were some terrible thing and walked to the kitchen, where I sat on the floor with my back against the refrigerator. My heart was still pounding rapidly, but it was no longer from the exercise. I was upset to receive this message because it was such bad news, because he had chosen to text me this bad news, and because it contradicted the understanding I thought we had between us.

  Sloane responds to Evan’s text with a simple text accepting his decision. (“thanks for letting me know,” “best of luck,” etc.) But Sloane wants closure and there is none in this transaction.

  What just happened? Sloane is left with questions that won’t go away about Evan’s unavailability to have a conversation. She feels devalued. “If he actually cared for me, why didn’t he make the effort to have a conversation with me so that I could address his concerns?” From this follow other painful possibilities. Her mind races round and round: “Because he did not want to have such a conversation, he must have decided that he did not care for me, after all.”

  Beyond the rejection, Sloane cannot let go of the idea that Evan misunderstood her point of view in the “funny conversation” that ended in the discussion of “labels.” Sloane worries that she gave Evan the impression that any relationship with her would require commitment. In fact, she would have been happy to take their relationship slowly. “If we had actually had a breakup conversation, I would have had fewer—if any—questions like these.” Despite all of this, Sloane feels silenced by the breakup text. She wishes she could be certain that Evan did not misunderstand her. But she comes to this conclusion: You don’t answer a breakup text with a call saying, “I want to talk.”

  What Just Happened?

  I am in Seattle at a three-day conference on social media, and one of the other speakers, a thirty-six-year-old architect named Adam tells me he would like to share his story about love enabled by online communication. Specifically, he wants to show me the electronic archive of his now broken-off relationship with Tessa, then an art student, with whom he had spent three joyful, if turbulent, years.

  Adam says that it was with Tessa that he was his best self. Now, even three years after the relationship ended, he is still sorting through the question “Who am I outside of this relationship?” After every failed relationship, lovers try to hold on to the “better self” they felt themselves to be in the presence of their beloved. So Adam is asking a very old question.

  But since so much of Adam’s relationship with Tessa took place online, this old question has a new twist. Online, Adam was able to “edit” himself. Now, he wonders if he needs editing delays to be his best self. And how does the fact that he has an archive of his relationship with Tessa—the two were electronically in touch from thirty to fifty times a day—change how he looks back and how he moves forward?

  When Adam and I first meet, he begins by quoting the comedian Chris Rock, who said that to marry a woman, you have only two questions you need to ask yourself: “Do you like to fuck her? Do you like to have dinner with her?” Adam says that Tessa more than met the Chris Rock standard: Talking with Tessa, including and especially over text and email, could feel like sex. “In talking to Tessa, I would find myself crying literally tears of joy, I felt so understood and so, like, pushed and challenged in a loving way. And I felt empathized with, and she knew just how to mock me in the way that I mock myself and vice versa.” But Chris Rock also said that on first dates, we don’t send ourselves but we send our “representatives”; we send our best selves. Over time, our representatives can’t do the job and “we” start to show up. And that is where a relationship either works or doesn’t. In digital connections, the danger is that we can keep sending in our representatives. So, it’s harder to know what is working, if it is working.

  Adam says, “The most important thing for Tessa was to feel empathy, that I was with her, sharing, on the same page.” Every couple has a contract, usually implicit, about what will make the relationship work. In this relationship, Adam was to provide empathy and Tessa would appreciate his efforts, tutoring him along the way.

  In the end, Tessa accused Adam of being insufficiently empathic and broke things off. Three years later, Adam sees their split as inevitable. He was held to an unrealistic standard: “If every conversation has to fulfill these deep needs, then occasionally a conversation isn’t going to.” And with Tessa, every conversation was put to a test.

  Adam says he wanted to be the more “open” man that Tessa needed. He consoles himself that he gave it his best shot because electronic messaging allowed him to “pause and get it right” in his exchanges with Tessa. “If Tessa and I [had been a couple] at a time when emails and text messages were unavailable, I don’t think we would have stayed together.”

  Old Phones

  Adam and I have several meetings. At our first, he shows me the phone he used when he first met Tessa. It has long since been replaced, but his first exchanges with Tessa are “trapped” on it. After the breakup, Adam didn’t know how to connect this phone to his computer and this propelled him into a frenzy of activity: “So my first step was to crazily transcribe our text messages onto paper. . . . I would painstakingly note what I said and what she said and I would have to jerk between the sent messages folder on this crappy phone to the received messages and then, from the notes I took on paper, I typed things into a computer file.”

  There are still over a thousand messages left to transcribe, so in our interviews, Adam and I switch our attention from his old phone to computer files of transcribed conversations and then back again to the phone.

  Adam considers his general texting strategy: “I try for the Twitter effect. . . . I want them short and explosive. Like little bon-bons. . . . Like gifts.” Even before he met Tessa, he says, his texts were “crafted.” But once he was writing to Tessa, things moved beyond craft. Now Adam was compelled by something deeper. He was trying to be what Tessa needed: “a better self, a more empathic person, someone more able to share himself.” Adam says that Tessa used texting to help him be that person.

  I ask for examples. By this point in my research I’m not surprised that the first one I get involves punctuation. In texting, we’ve seen that
punctuation is one of the main ways to express all of the information that tone of voice and body posture would convey in face-to-face conversation. And we’ve seen that putting so much interpretive weight on punctuation means that a lot of attention is paid to seemingly little things—say, using a period instead of ellipses, elements in a code both partners understand. So to show me how Tessa helped him be a “better self,” Adam looks through a group of texts and finds a message with a well-placed exclamation point. He is jubilant: “Here! Something as small as the word ‘Sure!’ with an exclamation point. . . . She’s recognizing my need to feel acknowledged.”

  In another text, Tessa writes, “Just parked, will call!” Adam explains why this message is just right, punctuation-wise: “There’s that kind of, like—there’s a kind of joy that we’re going to see one another soon.” Adam acknowledges that the codes can change and what matters is keeping up with them: “I mean, who knows? Five years from now, maybe it would have been, ‘Just parked, will call you.’ Maybe that exclamation point would be gone.”

  Adam remembers the day he received the “just parked” text. It was during one of the happiest times of his life. He was in love. He was getting things right with Tessa. And then he explains how, for him, getting things right depended on editing.

  The Better, Edited, Self

  Adam says that early in their relationship, Tessa would sometimes present him with a problem, and his first instinct was often to suggest a solution. For example, she told him about a misunderstanding with her thesis supervisor and Adam was ready with some advice. Adam tells me that giving Tessa advice was always a mistake. It made her feel that he was not listening to her but trying to fix things. “The right thing is usually to say it is hard to imagine her pain but that I am there for her.” But Adam admits that if Tessa brought up a problem during a face-to-face conversation, he often forgot himself and presented her with advice. He says that he did better online, where he had time to reflect and revise.