Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

to a woman and say, “Afternoon sex?” and wink at her—unless he was some kind of R&B superstar, in which case he’d be doing it all the time and it would possibly be quite successful.
    Here’s another:

    Again, I have to assume if this guy met this woman at a bar, his introduction would be something better than “I like your tits.”
    The site, and women’s phones everywhere, are filled with cringeworthy exchanges like this. And clearly, these are extremely horrible messages. But from our interviews we learned that even for men who don’t write such blatantly disgusting nonsense, the smallest changes in what they text on a screen can make a huge difference in their dating success face-to-face.
    Sometimes guys who have made a good impression in person and are on the verge of a true connection decide to send something dumb and awful and totally screw things up. Sure, there are extremes, like the woman who immediately lost interest after a guy asked her to Snapchat a photo of “just one boob.”
    However, the mistakes people make are not always so egregious. We repeatedly found that one text can change the whole dynamic of a budding relationship. In a certain context, even just saying something as innocuous as “Hey, let’s hang out sometime” or spelling errors or punctuation choices can irritate someone. When I spoke with Sherry Turkle about this, she said that texting, unlike an in-person conversation, is not a forgiving medium for mistakes.
    In a face-to-face conversation, people can read each other’s body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice. If you say something wrong, you have cues to sense it and you have a moment to recover or rephrase before it makes a lasting impact. Even on the phone you can hear a change in someone’s voice or a pause to let you know how they are interpreting what you’ve said. In text, your mistake just sits there marinating on the other person’s screen, leaving a lasting record of your ineptitude and bozoness.
     • • • 
    The fact that your interactions on your phone can have such a profound effect on people’s impression of you as a person makes it clear that you basically have two selves now—your real-world self and your phone self.
    The phone self is defined by whatever it is you communicate onto the other person’s screen. I interviewed many women who told me that they didn’t always have sharp memories of guys to whom they gave their numbers after a conversation in a bar or over drinks at a party. In that context, the first message they get can be a huge factor in whether they reach back, and the phone self that’s presented makes all the difference. As you saw with the example with Rachel, even small tweaks of a text message can make the difference between being perceived as nice or mean, smart or dumb, funny or boring.
    In our interviews and focus groups, people in all parts of the world generously opened up the secret world in their phones. I’ve probably scrolled through more text message conversations than anyone and asked men and women what we all are wondering: What was going on in your head when you read/wrote that? What did you think of this guy/girl when you read this message? It was so fascinating to see how people’s words could evoke such a wide range of reactions.
    Let’s first look at the things that irritated people the most.
    THE GENERIC “HEY” TEXT
    After seeing hundreds and hundreds of messages in women’s phones, I can definitively say that most of the texts women receive are, sadly, utterly lacking in either thought or personality. Want to know what’s filling up the phones of nearly every single woman? It’s this: “Hey,” “Hey!” Heyyy!!” “Hey what’s going?” “Wsup,” “Wsup!” “What’s going on?” “Whatcha up to?”
    It seems like a harmless message to send, and I’ve surely sent a good number of them in my own dating life. I and all the others who have sent similar messages surely meant no