Waiting for a text message sucks, more than waiting for a phone call, or an email or really almost anything else. I would rather be forced to stare directly into a pot of water until it boils, and a watched pot never boils.
Honestly, more than ten minutes between messages is fairly inexcusable, especially, if you initiated the text message conversation. You see, when you are the receiver, when a person texts you, you are in charge of setting the pace for the conversation… you can either text back immediately, establishing the premise for them to then immediately reply, or you can wait a) because you don’t receive it right away or you’re busy or b) because you want to imply that you’re too busy and you didn’t receive it right away. Being the receptor gives you that power, but once the tone is set, the conversation initiator should really heed the established pace.
When responding to an initial message, I am completely against the unnecessary waiting choice (where you want to seem incredibly important, or completely unaffected by the message you received, so you wait to respond to it)… but I suppose it’s a situational based decision and I’ve witnessed a few cases where postponing response may have been a wise judgment. Anyways, if you immediately send a response, within 10 minutes of receiving a text, the person with whom you are corresponding should feel obligated to uphold this 10 minute waiting maximum. It’s just the way it should be, it’s complete misery to sit and wait for a text message, so don’t put people through that!
When waiting around for a response, once enough time elapses, if you are not preoccupied by anything else, your mind will inevitably jump to all kinds of terrible conclusions about why this person has yet to respond to you. Was my message to pushy!? Did they not want to hang out?! I thought, “Nothing, what are you doing?” came off as fairly casual, did they think that I was implying we should hang out, and if so, is there something so wrong with hanging out with me?!! Did they think that I was making a subtle notion to the fact that they allocate time poorly and are often doing in fact, “nothing” and that my response was sarcastic and condescending, are they angry with me? Should I send an apology text, or wait ‘til they respond?!? It’s a terrible downward spiral, fears grow exponentially until you reside to the fact that this person thinks you’re incredibly annoying or arrogant and wants nothing at all to do with you.
Until, *bling, the phone finally buzzes, you hurriedly flip it open and read the message and it says something like “driving home, want to grab dinner?”
Phew, your spirits are lifted, you realize that you are not the world’s biggest idiot and you can successfully interact with other human beings. So, you start to respond – but, you stop and realize that you must wait. It will appear too eager to send another immediate response. You recognize that to make up for your preliminary reckless text-enthusiasm you need to regain control of the pace of the conversation. So you put your phone away and wait at least, if not just a little longer for good measure, as long as it took for them to text you before you send a response.
This most likely makes the other person uncomfortable, and perhaps as upset as you were moments earlier and by the time they receive your response, “yeah, that’d be great,” they realize that they must wait to text you back.
This ludicrous cycle will inescapably continue until a)you meet up for an absurdly delayed dinner or b)one of you is forced to move on to other plans and has to cancel on the other.
I am fairly certain that this problem plagues mostly younger people… no disrespect to those hip 40-somethings and “with it” parents who have happily adapted texting into their daily lives, but their texting dilemmas usually resolve around very different issues.
You see, most older people will be extremely delayed in texting responses simply because a) they have not embraced the T9 entry phenom, b) none of their children are around to write the text for them or c) they do not realize what that little message bubble at the top of their phone indicates and only stumble upon their messages when looking for their handy and oh so trendy “tip calculator” at lunch.
There are also of course the capable old-people texters who can T9 with the best of us and send and receive hundreds of messages per day. But, these people are not aware of the implications of delaying a text – due to the fact that they weren’t texting during those awkward and insecure years of their lives and usually only send messages regarding certainties about work, kids or family.
There is an entire subtext of conversation going on below any text correspondence that is directly related to the intervals of time between sent messages, an undertone that is almost more important than the messages themselves. Understanding and wielding the power of texting-time-management is something that is second nature to those of us who have been raised in intensive techno-communicative society… We can spin anything, make any point, make people think exactly what we want them to about the conversation just by sending a text at the perfect moment… something that “old folks” don’t understand… because they’ve never had to.
Bottom-line: being withholding of anything in some absurd power struggle is unnecessary and immature. So text back, text back as soon as you possibly can and never give into the “nobody likes me, everybody hates me, nobody texted me, I’m gonna eat some worms,” mentality.
