It seems that men and women tend to use texting in romantic relationships. However, there’s a slight difference between them. Men use texting to be less committed - and therefore safer from being rejected by a potential date. How? Texting provides a protective shield, because the “texter” is less involved in the situation unlike participating in a F2F conversation or on a phone conversation. Unlike men, women use text messaging as another mean to nurture their emotional interactions.
So, men prefer to pursue a potential date using texting to avoid the upfront rejection (can’t blame them, really :-)). Women, on other hand, want to see men make an effort to get a date. That effort would elevate the lucky woman’s social esteem and tag her as “hard to get woman” (can’t blame women either ;-)). So apparently there is a conflict between emotional needs of men and women regarding “phase 1” in relationships and regarding the reasons for texting. Women claim that texting caused a reduction in seriousness on behalf of courting men. Either way, life is the evidence that texting relationships do happen, and even flourish.
But way more interesting is what new technologies would do to human relationships. We all agree that texting reduced the amount of participation\ involvement in the process of communication. Who doesn’t prefer saying hard things through SMS?
SMS’s younger brother, the MMS, is a more complementary way of communicating. MMS is a wider visual means of communication that provides the user a lot more than 160 characters. Via MMS we can send pics with voice, or even short films. So girls could get invitations to a picnic date through an MMS with a pic like the one put here. Yet, we see that most people stick to the good ol’ SMS and use MMS less frequently. I can only assume that when it comes to flirting and dating, even lesser people use MMS. If you have any knowledge about the subject, feel free to comment!
Taking it another step further in the evolution of visual technology - pointing on video chats or F2F communication - asking out on a date using video chat isn’t much different from asking out on the street, in a bar or anywhere else… so would you do it that way?
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