There is a dynamic to text message communication that is diabolical in nature. It works for the closest of friendships, built on years of reciprocity and revelation, where nearly anything goes; and it is perfectly fine for family dynamics, where you can interpret a parent or sibling’s tone like it is stirring from your own psyche. Yet for any less intimate relationship, texting is always on the brink of faltering, teetering towards humiliation. The other day I saw a man at Union Station in DC signing to someone over FaceTime for the few minutes he had before boarding the commuter train; I don’t know ASL, but the two seemed to have a satisfying exchange. I’m guessing, but I imagine a deaf person would have plenty of reasons to prioritize text message communication while on the go, and yet here he was on a phone call. And I don’t know the nature of his relationship to the person he was talking to, but what I witnessed led to my conviction that casual friends should start calling each other again. Nearly everyone under the age of 45 acts like they don’t have time for this more intimate version of communication at a distance, but certainly we all have much more time to be talking in 5 to 10 minute spurts—intoning and interrupting—than we do for the incessant, take-your-turn typing.
Though it’s not about the phone, is it. I tell my therapist I don’t like to insist. If I’m honest, it feels beneath me. Fiona Apple lyrics come to mind: “I would beg to disagree/ but begging disagrees with me”. I’m a dignified woman; you catch the ball or the game’s over. Recently, an acquaintance—someone I have known for years and who I have a comical familiarity with, as if we are second cousins who grew up on the same street or old rivals who have put our differences aside to collaborate on a great act of revenge—asked me how I was by describing me as “mysterious.” And my own sister called me the “rogue sibling,” unpredictable—as likely join the circus in France as I am to end up mothering three kids upstate (it’s funny, because after writing this, a dear friend tells me about the major options in life that currently lie before her: motherhood, becoming a psychoanalyst, or clown school in France; we might go rogue in the same ways). On one hand, I see what they both mean, my sister and the acquaintance. I’m mysterious even to myself. But also, I usually know what I am about to do.
I emotionally premeditate. I think of various scenarios, how a whole story may play out between me and another person, arranging and rearranging multiple variables. I like to think of the least satisfying ones first, to get them out of the way, and then indulge in pure fantasy in moments of desperation. And so when I’m with a person I don’t know very well, who I can’t exactly relax around, I’ll have a kind of map of likely hopes and potential disappointments, and usually, eventually, something lines up. It’s more of a hobby than a problem, most of the time, I think. I suppose this is a version of the writing process. And it’s nothing to be proud of—it’s actually quite obscene. But you have to plunge to your basest self before you can rise to any level of sophistication. Friends keep telling me to externalize this process, to share my desires and fears with those I want to be closer to. You can’t be coy about this kind of thing, and you cannot guess how the other party will respond. I guess the last remaining possibility for genuine surprise in life is to be painfully honest with someone you want something with.
The problem might be in letting myself get desperate. I ought to get out while I’m ahead, which, luckily, I often am (the benefit of premeditation). In a moment of confidence: Hello, would you pay attention to me? Would you hold my hand and tell me I’m good? Do you think about me when I’m not around? Do you believe I am talented at the vocation to which I have dedicated my adult life? Will you do various things with me, that are very specific and I have thought about a lot, but maybe not enough, and patiently? What should I make for dinner? And now, could you ask me your own questions, not just repeating mine for yourself but really plunging into the basest self and coming back up with your own?
Still, I hate the ubiquity of the self-help question “What do you want?” If I always knew, I would be so far ahead I would no longer be able to commune with other humans. Surely, confusion is the necessary premise of all of this talking. Where we retreat, believing our own muddled states to be so unique, so impossible, we fail each other. What if, instead, every great relationship contains open questions, the answers to which are not planned or considered, but made up every day on the spot?