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“If you have very little to go on, you’re most susceptible to your own kind of idiosyncratic perception guiding your understanding of what’s going on,” she says. “And often instead of saying, ‘I’m having this reaction, and maybe this means that, but maybe it also doesn’t,’ we tend to start to get married to those interpretations.”
“Impression management,” Trub adds, has always been a part of romantic pursuits: “How quick is too quick, and how slow is too slow, has always been a part of our estimation in dating.”
Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Back when people had landline phones, it was normal to let a call from a prospective partner go to voicemail to create mystery or not answer the phone until at least the third ring so it wouldn’t seem as if you were waiting all night for a call.
Trub also pointed to differences in attachment styles – anxious, avoidant or secure – as a better way to understanding each person’s individual needs. It’s OK to play it cool in the beginning, but she recommends focusing less on generalised rules for texting while dating and more on trying to build up a “tolerance” for not knowing what a particular text might mean.
“Why don’t you talk to the person during the date about where texting resides in their daily life?” she says. “Because for some people that is both possible and pleasurable to engage in the back and forth; with other people, it’s possible but really not pleasurable.”
When it comes to other potential “icks” – texts that are too long or too frequent, for example – the way messaging behaviour is received largely depends on how much the person likes you or how long you’ve been dating.
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Anthony Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who specialises in social media, youth and communication technology, says that social norms and generational differences represent another wrinkle in how we approach messaging while dating.
Different age demographics and social groups might have very different ideas about how available they should be – “how fast people should respond to me and how I respond to them,” he says. “Like, if we’re in a small friend group, maybe the people in that friend group are responding very fast and we find there may be that pressure to respond faster in that group as well.”
And this can go the opposite way, too. According to a report this year by the dating app Hinge, Gen Z Hinge users were 50 per cent more likely than Millennials to delay responding to a message “to avoid seeming overeager”.
Kapinos recalls having texted “all day, every day” with someone she had previously dated and says she had enjoyed the sense of instant gratification she would get from seeing his name appear on her screen. She described herself as a secure person who “leans anxious” at times, so when she didn’t receive a specific emoji or an “LOL” from someone she was seeing, she would overthink it.
“I’ve gotten way better at that,” she says. “I’m in a relationship now where I’ve just been so forthcoming about what I need, especially in regards to communication, and he’s been unbelievably great and calls me all the time. But I think we also have that same need.“
The New York Times
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