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If they haven’t replied to your texts it doesn’t mean they’re ignoring you

Therapist
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There’s a lonely kind of craziness in falling out with people who almost certainly have no idea you’ve fallen out.

We live, according to the cliche, in an age of “instant communication”. Only we don’t. The truth is we live in an age when instant communication is possible – when your email, text or direct message might receive a reply in moments – but when that’s often not what actually happens. Emails, and increasingly texts and DMs, too, wait days or even weeks for a response. “The result,” as Julie Beck put it recently in the Atlantic, “is the sense that everyone could get back to you immediately, if they wanted to – and the anxiety that follows when they don’t.” In the old days, instant replies were either obligatory (as in face-to-face conversation) or impossible (as in snail mail). Now, though, we’ve hopelessly confused the two. So when no reply is forthcoming, we’ve no idea what to think.

This explains the peculiarly modern phenomenon of being involved, at any given time, in a half-dozen emotionally awkward situations that may in fact not exist beyond the confines of one’s own head. Right now, for example, I’m convinced a dear friend is angry or distressed that I still haven’t responded to his newsy pre-Christmas message; meanwhile, a professional contact who suggested lunch has gone silent since my enthusiastic reply, perhaps having realised she’d confused me with someone more noteworthy and being too embarrassed to admit it. Yet of course I have zero evidence for either belief: I suspect my friend hasn’t given the matter any thought, while the contact is furiously busy and will eventually reply. There’s a special, lonely kind of craziness in experiencing ongoing tensions with people who almost certainly aren’t experiencing them back. To read more from Oliver Burkeman, click here.