We Ask Too Much of Texting
Notes on intimacy and presence
A few years ago, during my first surf camp in the Algarve, I stood at Cape St. Vincent and watched the sun set over the Atlantic. Cape St. Vincent is the southwesternmost point of continental Europe, a cliff where Europe ends and the Atlantic begins. I remember the orange bleeding into the water, then the pink, then the colour that doesn’t have a name, the one that only exists for about ninety seconds before the sky goes blue again. Kids were laughing somewhere behind me. Someone nearby was smoking, and the wind kept carrying the smell over in little pulses, gone and back and gone again. The air had that particular salt you only get on the Atlantic, heavier than the Mediterranean. And the cold. The cold that doesn’t arrive gradually but drops the moment the sun does, like the temperature was waiting for a cue.
If you asked me to tell you about it, I’d probably say: it was a nice sunset. 🤷♀️
That’s what words do. They compress. A whole sensory world flattens into three or four syllables, the other person nods, something has been communicated, and almost nothing has been transferred.
When we actually talk, we get a little help. Intonation. Pace. The pauses between words. These are called paralinguistic cues, and they do the work of stretching language back toward the thing it’s trying to describe. Still a compression. But less of one.
Now take away even that. Strip out the voice. Leave only the text on a screen.
This is the medium we’ve decided to use for some of the most important exchanges of our lives.
Most of us have had the version of this I’m about to describe.
You meet someone and you click. The conversation has that easy quality where you’re both talking over each other in the good way, finishing each other’s sentences, pulling up the same references. You leave feeling lit up. You exchange numbers.
And then you start texting.
I had a friendship like this once. We met in person and something fired. Then we moved to WhatsApp and Instagram, and for months we sent each other everything. Articles about modern art, photography we loved, exhibitions we wanted to see, long exchanges about the things we cared about most. It felt like the friendship was deepening.
The next time we met in person, the dynamic was bland. Flat. I felt like I was sitting across from a different person than the one I’d been texting. Neither of us had done anything wrong. We just couldn’t find each other in the room.
I spent a long time trying to understand what had happened. My first hypothesis was that one of us had been performing, or that I’d misread her, or that I’d built her up in my head. None of that felt quite right. The texting had been real. The in-person connection had been real, once. Something in between had gone wrong, and I didn’t have the language for it.
I found the language later, in a book by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Her argument is that texting isn’t a degraded form of conversation. It’s a fundamentally different act that we’ve mistaken for conversation.
My favourite distillation from the book is this: real conversation has the friction of another person in front of you, someone who can surprise you, contradict you, go silent on you. Texting has none of that. It lets us edit, delete, curate, and leave. And what we practise, we get better at. We’ve been practising avoidance.
That was the thing I didn’t have words for. My friend and I hadn’t been having a conversation for months. We’d been sending each other the most polished versions of ourselves, at the times we felt most ready to send them, about the subjects we were most articulate on. Of course it felt good. It was designed to feel good. Both of us were authoring it.
What we hadn’t done was sit across from each other with nothing to say and let that silence be okay. We hadn’t disagreed about anything. We hadn’t watched each other be tired, distracted, unsure. We hadn’t had the friction.
Authenticity is one of the things that holds a bond together. Without it, whatever you’re building with someone else is built on a version of them, or a version of you, that won’t last. Which brings me to the question I kept circling back to.
Can you actually be authentic in a medium that gives you infinite time to edit yourself?
Because that is what a real-life conversation gives you. It doesn’t give you authenticity as virtue. It gives you authenticity as a constraint. You can’t edit, you can’t delete and retype. Your face does things your brain didn’t authorise. The other person sees you hesitate, contradict yourself, go quiet when you don’t know what to say. That’s not you choosing to be authentic. It’s you not being allowed to hide.
Texting removes that constraint. And without it, even people who want to be authentic can’t fully be, because the medium gives them too many tools to smooth themselves out.
None of this means I’ve stopped texting. I live far from my family and most of my oldest friends, and texting is how we stay in each other’s days between the longer phone calls and visits in person that do the real work.
With my local friends it’s different. I keep the texting minimal, mostly around logistics, and we plan to meet in person to catch up properly.
All of these relationships were built in person. The text thread is a thin wire between things that already exist.
That sunset taught me something I didn’t fully have words for until I wrote this. I could only really have it because I was there. Not just to see it, but to feel the cold arriving, the rock under me, the smoke carried over in pulses, the salt in the air, all of it happening to me at the same time. A photo would have kept the orange and the blue. A description would have kept even less.
Conversations work the same way. When you’re in a room with someone, you’re not just receiving their words. You’re receiving the pause before they answer, the way they shift when the topic gets close to something, whatever their face is doing while they listen. You’re giving the same back without thinking about it. The words are a small part of it.
I think that’s what I’ve been trying to say. Texting gives you the words. It doesn’t give you the rest.