The Text Game

THE TEXT GAME

In order to understand yourself, you need to understand the people around you and what they are thinking. Why do you need to understand the people around you? Because the people around you will be the purveyors of who you are. They will be the ones who will judge you. The ones who essentially lead you to believe whether you are an attractive, funny, polite, crazy, confident, intimidating, or whatever person. Get it? 

I want you to do me a favor after reading that. Take that entire last paragraph and debate whether you should ever read my blog again if I repeat anything even close to that one time. What I just mentioned is the complete opposite of being confident.  It is the crap ruining generations. It is the most insecure and self-judgmental way to treat yourself. Similarly, it the worst possible thing you could do to yourself. Let others dictate who you are? Come on.

Now, don’t get me wrong, listening to other people’s advice to better yourself is one thing. Staying humble to listen to wise sound advice is exactly what you should be doing. But listening to some d-bag tell you how you should portray yourself via Instagram is an entirely different thing. The most confident thing you can do is be you, love you, and rock you. Who cares what others are doing, buying, or acting upon. If you allow one story, one tweet, or one picture without enough likes to affect your life, lets be real, you have a problem.

I have seen too many people get affected by what someone else is going to say. The craziest thing I’ve seen, is what I like to call, The Text Game. The text game, is the completely asinine and absurd game people play when they are trying to speak or meet someone new through any textual medium (texting, DM’ing, hinge/bumble messaging, etc.). You know you’ve done it before. I’ve done it before.

You know that game or strategy when you get that first text from a girl and you decide whether you should wait 14.3475 minutes to respond versus right away. Or wait 2 days to text back after a date because you don’t want to come off as desperate. Or the, and I love these the most, the, do I do a double text or is triple text too much. Do I right long paragraphs or short texts but five of them in a row. Every single one of you knows what Im speaking of. I have seen guys all over, even my best friends come up with some elaborate strategies, claiming this is the gold standard of conversation. Does some of it work, yea maybe sometimes. But does it work because you just played off the equivalent of Warren Buffett’s stock training strategy in the dating world? Absolutely not. Congratulations, you just got lucky and got a girl to laugh that didn’t really get your joke in the first place. It works because YOU’RE YOU.

One of my best friends and I cut right down to the chase. We text how we text, however, to be clear, we don’t like texting. We don’t have time for it. Some of your texts might go unread or we forget to respond, or even worse however unintentional, we don’t think to text you at all, not because we aren’t interested but because we are too busy trying to be successful people. Yes, that sounds douchey but its true. What do we do instead? Pick up the damn phone and call you. You know why? Because that’s how people are supposed to communicate. That’s how you find the real people. One of my best friends Facetimes chicks right out the gate. Like, (1) Match on bumble (2) lets facetime…….To most, this guy is an absolute looney tune but guess what, every single one of the women he does it to, LOVES IT. Pure uniqueness. There are way to many dates where someone texts and pulls out a conversation to somewhat get my interest however in person is completely different. Why does this usually happen? Because anyone can be anyone behind a wall. Anyone can be anyone without the judgement of person-to-person interaction. If you meet someone who stops speaking to you because of how you text, do me a favor, and delete their number. Could you imagine furthering that relationship. What else are you going to be judged on? Good luck.

This is the problem with this world. We care way to much about what others think. In order to be confident with yourself, just be yourself. If you want to halt the initial texting and go right for the in person date, my god please do it. Ill buy your first drinks. If you want to do a long text, then send it. If that’s calling someone or Facetiming, do it. I know I send longer paragraph texts all the time. You want to know why? Because its actually the proper way to write in the English language. Would you send six short emails in a row to a client one day later because it’s the best strategy. Have you read a book that is four hundred pages of single lined sentences. What?! Could you imagine even trying to read that. Its ridiculous.  

All im asking is that you do me a favor and take that all in. That was one or two examples of how we are all constantly in this world thinking what others think of them. You can not be confined to the perception of others. If you are always thinking about other people’s judgements, you are never going to be confident in yourself. Just rock you.

-TCM