Dating is new to me and so is dating by text message. I know that this dates me tremendously and that I have to think about what the ramifications of dating by text actually are. I usually don’t agree with askmen.com’s advice—see my writing for several examples of my specific complaints—but in this particular article, the man in question actually seems to come up with some fairly decent advice.

Dating by text message is an odd form of communication because you are limited in the number of words that you can say.

And the surprise of what will be said in the text makes me nervous. I hear the sound and wonder who is texting. Just now, the text wasn’t from the guy I thought it was going to be from, but from another guy. It wasn’t a disappointment necessarily, but it did make me understand what Carie Bradshaw was going through during her trials and tribulations during “Sex & the City.”

Dating by text brings back all of the ups and downs of high school; the insecurity and the ambiguity make things more uncertain. Sometimes I’ll get a text from someone and wonder if the text was because he was thinking of me in particular or if the guy was just catching up on all of his phone texts at once. It’s hard to know the difference sometimes.

I once dated a guy for a bit and the entire relationship was by text. The texts started off more meaningful and got progressively less so, so I took that as a warning sign that things were not going well. I felt like I needed a guide book to navigate the treacherous waters of dating by text.  

What I liked about the askmen.com article was the acknowledgement of the drunk text. The drunk text can parlay itself into all kinds of strange things. Sexts, marriage proposals, booty calls, and break ups are the first drunk texts that come to mind. While most marriage proposals by text aren’t taken all that seriously, the booty call text is.

The worst part about the booty text is that the auto-correct can make an already-drunk texter sound even worse than he would during a slurred phone call. Of course, the advantage to the girl getting the booty text is that she has time to think about what she wants to do or not. While the booty text may be considered less sophisticated than an actual phone call, at least it’s fast.