College Times

Issue date: 4/9/09 Section: Sex

Media Credit: iStockPhoto.com

It’s no secret that texting is becoming college-aged adults’ preferred way to communicate.

But what they’re texting to their romantic partners appears to offer strong insight into whether their relationships will eventually succeed or fail.

Richard Slatcher and researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed 10 days of instant and text message conversations from almost 70 American couples who had been dating for nearly one and a half years. Couples, participating in the study, published recently in Personal Relationships,were also required to answer questions about relationship satisfaction.

Six months later, the couples – which had an average age of 19 – indicated whether they were still dating. The study found, after the six-month period, about 60 percent of couples were still dating, while nearly 40 percent had broken up.

The researchers used the instant and text messages as a way to gauge both partners’ satisfaction and to look for correlations as to why almost half of them broke up. They read through the conversations, and noted the context of the text and IM threads. Then, they used a linguistic word count program to analyze the conversations’ pronouns and words loaded with emotional content.

Their findings: individuals who were more in touch with their own needs were more likely to succeed.

In other words, couples who stayed together used “I” nearly 20 times more frequently than “we.” Women who used many “I”’s within conversations were 30 percent more likely to stay in their relationships compared with other women who didn’t speak about themselves as much.

And of the emotional words, successful couples were most likely to use positive words, rather than negative ones.

“We found that the extent to which people used positive emotion words like ‘great,’ ‘happy,’ ‘love,’ tended to be happier in their relationships and to stay in their relationships for a longer period of time,” Slatcher said in the journal.

Of course, some people who believe examining texting to judge the health of a relationship is an oxymoron.

They question whether any relationship can be healthy when the primary method of interaction is through an electronic screen.

All Text and No Say?

When Kristen Abraham, an English literature freshman at Arizona State University, had to deal with a long distance relationship all over text, she got quickly fed up.

All “he did was text me, I couldn’t take it,” she said. “I would ignore his texts, and you would assume that he would get the clue, but he would just incessantly text message me. Very, very rarely he’d call me.”

Abraham said she got annoyed because he wouldn’t put forth the effort to actually take the time to call her.

“There’s something to be said about actually setting aside time to call someone,” she said. “When it got to the point that he wouldn’t get an answer when he texted me, he would finally call me.”

She also said that she would ask him to not text her as much, but the message didn’t really get across.

“It was hard to deal with. It was really overwhelming and stressful, because you feel constantly pressured to reply, and that’s the last thing I wanted to feel in a relationship,” she said.

At one point, Abraham said, right before she broke up with him, it got to the point where it went from annoying to “almost stalkery.”

“He just really liked to know where I was at all times, I guess,” she said. “That got way old after a while, and that’s when I knew I was through.”

Her story proves Slatcher’s point: Abraham was not using “I” in her texts to her boyfriend or positive words like “happy” and “love” but rather ignoring his texts and hoping he would get the point. A sign, according to the study, that the relationship had a better chance of ending.

Self-empowered

One would think the idea that the use of “I” more than “we” would be a sign of selfishness – something not necessarily desirable in an equal relationship.

But Jeff Schultz, a local certified sex addiction therapist with the Sonoran Healing Center, says the use of “I” shows a trait crucial to a healthy relationship: You must know yourself before you try to know others.

“Above and beyond the way in which you talk to your mate, if you identify with your mate more than yourself, that usually means there’s less of a chance that the relationship will last,” he said.

Schultz said he has seen the text-relationship phenomenon a lot in the recent past, and that it could potentially change the way healthy relationships are defined.

“We are gradually becoming a truly disconnected culture on an intimate and face-to-face relational basis,” he said. “This phenomenon is worst with the younger generations as they are more familiar with the technology that permits fantasy relationships than are the older folks.”

He also said that when relationships are kept strictly to the virtual world, the eye has more of a tendency to wander.

“When a relationship – emotional or sexual – begins or maintains in the virtual world, then the risk of rejection is minimal and the opportunity to fantasize is tremendous,” Schultz says. “A person could spend hours preoccupied with a person they have never met while real people and real relationships – all around them – become fewer and fewer.”

He says that one reason why people gravitate to this virtual world is that it allows a person to maintain an illusion of control.

“If a person gets dumped in a texting relationship, it may be a little easier to take,” he says. “Another likely reason is that we have lost our sense of community and have come to fear real intimate and social interactions.”

Schultz also explains that the some of the youth of today probably raised themselves because their parents were over-involved in their jobs. This gives them weak relationship models, he says.

“Consider that the young people of today may have raised themselves while their parents were preoccupied with achieving success and so had little involvement in their kids’ lives. Today, that young person, who never had intimate relationships modeled for him or her, finds themselves with real problems with courtship – how do I ask a woman on a date? How do I get a guy I like to notice me? How do I accept that he or she might not want to go and that my worth and value is unaffected? It’s a no-brainer that they would gravitate toward those less intimate types of relationships like texting.”

Flora Sarder, an English literature sophomore at ASU, said that she understands that it may be a generational thing based on the fact that parents needed to work to support their kids more than in generations past. But still, she said, that’s no excuse for not making the effort to actually reach out and speak to someone.

“It’s cowardly, in my opinion, to text or instant message someone, or even use Facebook for that matter, to try to connect with someone romantically,” she said.

She also said that she sees the appeal of these electronic forms of communication because it’s not all the time that you can call someone or speak to them in person.

“It’s a double-edged sword because you can send someone a text when you’re in class, or Facebook them, or IM them. But then, sometimes you rely on it too much and it becomes the only way you connect with people,” she said.

Therapeutic Value

Regardless of experts’ opinions on text-dating, some researchers see real benefits in Slatcher’s study.

Text-heavy relationships are likely to be here for awhile. Therapists must focus on making them healthy.

Slatcher said in the journal that the “million-dollar question” is whether using certain words in text/instant messages when communicating with a partner leads to healthier relationships or if the most satisfied couples simply speak to each other with certain pronouns and emotion words.

If couples could get a boost from changing how they speak to each other, “that’s big news,” Slatcher said, as the finding has implications for couples’ therapy.

Still, Paul Billing-Ross, a biology sophomore at ASU, said that he feels as if texting and instant messaging are less personal and more informal.

“It is more convenient and less stressful,” he said. “You have more time to react and there’s less of a chance of rejection or anything like that. But I do think most of the relationships in the future will still be founded on person-to-person relationships. Meeting a person face-to-face will always be unbeatable.”

As far as Abraham was concerned, when it came time to end her relationship with her long distance text-happy boyfriend, she said it was easy.

“I just sent him a text,” she said. “It seems sort of ironic and it wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it worked.”

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