Yahoo Lifestyle 'I'm 25 and I'm an in-person-only friend — please don't make me WhatsApp'
I’m rushing to get ready for dinner when I realise I can’t find my phone. It’s nearly my birthday and my family and boyfriend have gathered for early celebrations. Oh well, I think to myself, everyone who texts me will be round the table, anyway.
I’m what you could call an in-person-only friend. Growing up, I couldn’t get enough of BBM, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. I’d spend hours sending GIFs, memes, and funny texts. Now, I’ll nosy at what everyone’s getting up to on social media, but the number of messages I send and receive has plummeted. I have three active iMessage chats to be exact. The rest are dormant. In other words, my phone rarely buzzes with a flood of notifications, and my group chats resemble ghost towns, save for when we’re making plans. I regularly go days without chatting to friends.
Should I be making more time for my pals? Am I missing out? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while, even now my birthday has been and gone, and my phone temporarily lit up with birthday well wishes.
I love my friends, and I could exchange daily updates, cocktail recipes and TikTok videos with them on the regular, but I just don’t. Between commuting, working, working out, and commuting some more, it feels like there’s never enough time to get through my to-do list. Suffice to say, the texts I do receive often go unanswered for days, and don’t even talk to me about voice notes. If I need to find my headphones or head to a quiet place before recording my answer, expect not to hear back from me. It’s not malicious, I just can’t handle it.
Like many of us, my attention span is definitely on the decline and I’m far too easily distracted when my phone pings with a new message, which is bad news if an alert pops up during the work day, as research shows it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds for us to return to a task once workflow is broken. My solution? Vowing to reply when I’m less busy, later on. A great plan except for the small flaw that ‘later’ never arrives.
But the thing is, even if I could fix my time crunch, if I could magic up a few extra hours in the day, I wouldn’t want to spend them glued to my phone, sucked into a cycle of instant replies. I don’t want to feel ‘switched on’ 24/7, and I’m not the only person feeling overwhelmed by the incessant flurry of texts nowadays.
A recent Reddit thread on r/socialskills about 20-somethings not answering their messages returned lots of responses from people who feel similarly. “People are overwhelmed by being constantly bombarded with back-and-forth text conversations while also trying to juggle the tasks of daily life. I think a shift might be happening in texting culture,” one commenter suggested. “I think people are finally getting worn out by it.”
Another Reddit user agreed: “I dip out of chats all the time. There's chats I need to answer for months by now. It doesn't have to do with being uninterested or ghosting. Chatting is just my least favourite way of communication and I'm fairly busy, almost never just chatting for the sake of chatting.”
So, there’s another reason some of us are shunning text messages: they don’t feel meaningful anymore.
Even if (unlike me) you love small talk, it’s no surprise then that more of us are changing how we communicate in our friendships, almost reverting back to the pre-social-media era and shunning the tools we were forced to rely on during lockdown. For many, I’d hazard, it’s not about giving up social media (although I have friends who have done just that) but prioritising forms of communication that feel more authentic to us - like a FaceTime or an IRL meeting when possible.
Chartered Psychologist Dr Mark Rackley tells me, “Not everyone has the same communication style. Texting can be too impersonal for some and although it is a form of communication, it is not one that makes them feel bonded to others. If that is you, then recognise the type of communication that you need. You can have both texting and in-person communication at your disposal. Texting might be easy, but not necessarily fulfilling, so choose the type of communication that fulfils you and bonds you to others.”
Perhaps ironically, the key is being able to communicate about how you communicate. It’s useful to talk about your preferences, Dr Rackley explains, so that “expectations can be realistic and misunderstandings managed.” He continues: “Be inclusive and compromise, accept your friends for not only who they are but also their communication preferences.”
The pros and cons of being an in-person friend are, I assume, different for everyone. For me, being an in-person friend can be confusing. I feel lonely sometimes, a feeling shared by one in five young people aged 16-24, and, understandably, the feeling intensifies when I don’t get to see my friends often. Then I wonder if it’s like this for everyone in the early years of their career. Presumably not. I know many of my friends, who I text sporadically, are in near-constant communication.
But while realising at group catchups that everyone else has been nattering throughout the week, it doesn’t make me want to change, or at least not yet. Instead, I’ve been consciously investing in my friendships in different ways: signing my pals up to try new activities together, while forging new friendships of my own, at events like book clubs and run clubs, when my longtime friends are busy. Being an in-person friend means you’re always reliant on your group’s availability for your next friendship fix - but it also pushes you out of your comfort zone, encouraging you to meet new people.
So, like I said. I’m an in-person friend. That doesn’t mean I don’t love my besties. I’ve brought up the topic at dinner before with two of my close friends and we agreed, we’re happy with our sporadic communication style. Texting or not, we care about each other deeply and value our friendship. Oh, and when we do eventually get together, and we spend hours laughing about all the massive and minuscule life updates we have to share, there’s no better feeling.
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