I haven’t really decided what this blog is going to focus on. But I think, like myself, it’s going to have difficulties focusing on anything specific. Some articles might be a rant over a hot topic or something that I read that irritated me, others might be short stories and others might be writing exercises that I just wrote to get myself out of a creative slump and basically make no sense. This post, my first blog post, is a rant on the meme I read on Facebook that said, “when those texts start getting shorter with you they’re getting longer with someone else.” I am by no means a relationship expert. I have no idea what I’m doing in my own relationships, romantic or not, about 80% of the time. However, I think this concept is ridiculous from a literal perspective.
The literal meaning is setting the relationship expectation that you must always send me long text messages, or you must be cheating/interested in someone else. I know that when I read that message, my first thought was to evaluate the length of the text messages between my significant other and myself. I realized that they weren’t ever that long. But that we do spend hours on the phone when we can’t see each other and hours talking when we can see each other. So then why am I evaluating our relationship based on the length of text messages that he sends me? I shouldn’t be. Because that is ridiculous. We don’t evaluate our friendships with that precedent. Sometimes my best friend and I wont talk for two weeks because we are busy or something else is going on in our lives. According to that meme, they have now replaced me as a close friend. So then why do we hold our relationships to this crazy standard that you must always send me long text messages? We often expect way more from our romantic relationships than our friendships, which I think is also ridiculous but I’ll save that for a different post.
Now most of you are going to say, Brittani, you are taking this to literally. It’s just a meme. Yes, I’m frequently guilty of taking things to literally. Ok fine, metaphorically what the statement is alluding to is that we should pay attention to the responsiveness of our significant other and to the non-romantic relationships that we spend time investing on. This concept I agree with. The relationships that I’ve been in that have given me the most satisfaction and fulfillment are the ones that I can rely on them to be there for me when I need them. If I send a message to my boyfriend, even if he’s super busy, he’ll send me a message saying, “I’m stuck in a conference, I will respond as soon as I’m free.” Or to my best friends that I trust with all my secrets if I call them and they can’t talk, they always call me back later. But if I messaged them saying, no this is an emergency, I’m going through a crisis, I can count on them to at least attempt to drop everything and contact me. Think back to all of the relationships that you yearned for, begging them to pay attention to you. They left you on seen for 10 hours over a simple question like “are you free tomorrow to get some dinner?” And you’re turning away other plans on the hopes that they will say they want to see you. Miserable and dark times. If you are still chasing after people like that then I feel for you. And this message is for you. Don’t try hard for someone that is giving you that awful sad feeling of being ignored in the pit of your stomach. Drop them. Then show them what they missed out on.
Anyways, I’m getting distracted, my whole point is that we read things like this and we immediately evaluate our relationships based on one dimension concerning the length of our text messages. Which I don’t think is a healthy thing to do. If someone sent me that message, my immediate response would probably be something like “Well then be less boring.”
What are your thoughts? Is there anything you would add to my evaluation of this otherwise harmless Facebook meme?
Thank you for reading,
RedRiverGirl
Closed System 