The Art of Texting: Ryan’s Response

Sarah recently put up a post regarding her friendly mattress salesman (who may be the most idiotic texter I have ever seen with his octotext) so I figured that I would address the situation and offer up my two cents on texting and other ways that you can contact the opposite gender. These are a list of most of my failures in each of these mediums.

Texting

The reason why I haunt Sarah about double texting is because I used to be a capital offender. As seen in my Temple Run post I have often been afraid that girls did not totally “get” my first text so I should send them another one. Up until a couple years ago I also had a strange belief that most of my texts “weren’t going through” so I should send a second text just in case.  This did me no help in attracting girls and led to some major fails.

Sidenote: Thank god for phones that show you your whole cell phone conversation. Not only do they save you when you are sober and accidentally double texting but they give you hours of entertainment when you burn a bridge through a ridiculous group of drunk texts. Sometimes if you aren’t going to be with the girl a good laugh will suffice and most of the time what you text drunk and be forgotten.

Overall, the main rules to follow when texting girls (and girls can use this advice too) are:

1. Do not double text
2. Do not continue to talk about the same boring topic that you’ve been talking about since the Tuesday before last
3. Do less, meet more

These rules are basically self explanatory. It’s usually better to text less and leave more for your next in person conversation. Trust me.

While we have covered texting, I would like to mention a couple other mediums that I have tried and failed at using to talk to girls. They ranked from moderately bad to terrible:

Facebook Messages – Code Orange

Seemed like a great idea back in the day (aka college). Oh a girl didn’t give me her number? Send her a Facebook message!  Not only can you send regular messages but you can also send links (that she will never ever look at) or write long-winded notes (that she will never ever read).

Drunk Facebook messaging is an even worse enemy for me.  At a time where you are feeling overly confident and wordy you are given a computer rather than a phone to text with. Perfect. I really need the opportunity to embarrass myself at 100 words a minute rather than being hindered by my ability to see a tiny screen while wasted.

Whether it is Facebook messaging girls in relationships (bad), sending Facebook messages to girls that you don’t know but want to get with (worse), or sending drunk Facebook messages to a 1 that you just met and who liked you (yup that’s the winner) Facebook messaging is never the right idea. While I still occasionally throw out a Facebook message to a random girl (old habits die hard) I would advise treading lightly here.

Linked-In Message – Code Red

I don’t even think ½ of America knows that these exist but I managed to use them as a tool for hitting on girls. Cue cute girl sending me a linked-in request this past year and my thought process. “Oh I haven’t talked to her in a while I bet that linking-in with me means she definitely wants to do it. I should send her a message.” Fast forward to the most awkward exchange of messages due to the fact that we were communicating on a medium that was meant for people to network. I don’t think that they had in mind “so what are you up to this weekend?” when they were creating it.

However, to follow this up, I did send the girl a text and talked to her about how weird LinkedIn messages were and had a brief conversation with her for a couple days. Clearly the main point is to get girls on text messages rather than these horrible mediums.

Written Letter – Code For-the-Love-of-God-What-Are-You-Doing

This is back in middle school so you really can’t beat me up too bad for being young and naïve. So I had gone out with this girl Stephanie for about a month when she broke my 12 year old heart and dumped me via a friend at the middle school winter dance.  Tragedy.  I then spent the next 2 months trying to woo her back, however my worst attempt was a letter that I wrote her. It was a brief letter that included how I felt about her and that I really thought that we should be together. Not that embarrassing. What was embarrassing was that I wrote out all of the lyrics to N’SYNC’s “This I Promise You” in the letter. I know what you’re thinking, JT was the songbird of our generation, of course I would include them. It gets worse. I wrote the different parts of the song that the different members sang in different colors. AHHHHHHH. Horrible horrible move, and it still gives me tremors thinking about it. Do less young Ryan, do less!

The moral of the story is that you should get a girl in person and be confident in yourself. After both of you have a couple drinks it will ease the tension and make you have a more comfortable experience. Giving girls the opportunity to show their friends your idiocy in your text/Facebook/Linked-In messages is not going to help you get laid and JT’s words in your shitty penmanship is not going to get you anywhere. Showing them that you are confident and fun in person just might do the trick though.