The Importance of Texting Etiquette

I love texting, and I am a firm believer in using technology to make life easier, but there are some situations where texting just will not do. There are certain things that must be said in person…or at least, you know, live.

Example: I friend of mine was broken up with via text message. (I know, I know, you are recoiling in horror, as was I when I heard of this texting faux pas! Texters like this guy make all of us with cell phones strapped to our finger tips look bad.) She’s this tall, gorgeous, redhead who is genetically gifted with the type of skin that will make her perpetually look like she is in her late twenties for the rest of her life even though she is currently in her early forties --which come to think about it ought to make me hate her, but she is too sweet and her life is too cool for me to do anything but live vicariously through her. The fact that anyone would break up with her is shocking to me, and I told her so when she related her tale about her most recent steady who had seemed to be an above-board guy until one hour before their final date. That was when she received a text saying that he thought they shouldn’t see each other any more, and it was best if they just made a clean break of it, and it wasn’t her it was him, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Now, I ask you, does a break up via text message just scream pansy or what? I mean, breaking up with someone over the phone is the coward’s way out, so what does that make a text message breaker-upper? I don’t think a word for that kind of pathetic behavior has been invented, yet! Oh, but it gets even better:

She texts him back. Just two simple letters: O. K.

A minute later the phone rings. It’s the texter! He wails that he is shocked that she would be so callous as to textually accept his texted break up proposal! He says she is rude for not calling him to accept his break up! (I know, I know…clearly he is projecting, right?) So, she patiently explains to him that she only wanted to complete the break up in the format with which he seemed most comfortable. At this point he stutters something about how Midwesterners aren’t the nice people they are billed out to be (He was from New York.), and hangs up on her.

The weird thing is that he seemed like a normal human up until the relationship ending text and subsequent emotional break down during the follow up phone call. But we chalk up his sudden strange behavior and lack of texting etiquette to the fact that he was in one of the buildings very close to the Twin Towers when they went down. Perhaps he is suffering from post-traumatic stress. I mean, why else would you fear commitment from a brilliant redhead?