I Love My Friends. I Ignore Their Texts Anyway.

For fun/self-examination/self-flagellation, I recently searched my text messages for the phrase “sorry for the delay.” A harrowing result: it turns out I actually write “so sorry for the delay.” My friends were so sorry, too. We were, collectively, so sorry that we hadn’t responded immediately to non-urgent texts, memes, selfies, gossip, etc. We had no excuses. We just… *weary sigh.*

When I took a casual poll, we talked about avoiding our texts to do things like: be totally present while at a birthday dinner, protect our creative world to do our art, cook, read, go on a stomping walk, watch a movie, focus at work. There are also less obviously noble pursuits. We ignored friends to scroll strangers’ accounts “which were mostly trash.” We watched medium-bad television. We ordered a cocktail dress online that may prove to be quite see-through in person.

While there’s almost nothing we value more than each other, we consistently ignore each other, while like… mindlessly deleting selfies we took in mediocre lighting? We couldn’t understand it.

My friend Naomi, who lives in D.C. — which will become obvious extremely quickly — described this dilemma as “the classic Eisenhower matrix ‘important-not-urgent’ quadrant”: “urgent” meaning things that need immediate attention, “important” meaning things that are essential to your life. (Do you love her? I do!) This is a really strange space to navigate. It’s contradictory: Communication with our friends is essential and beloved, yet also an interruption.

The phone is the foundation for a lot of modern friendship. Or, at least it has been after my mid-20s, when people’s lives have veered in such directions as “I have twins and a toddler” and “I’m directing a full-ass small business.” We text, we DM, we send memes, we call, we FaceTime, we voice memo, and there’s the rare email, too. It’s not urgent, but it’s all important. (For the record, I’d qualify urgent as: “Which boots should I wear tonight”? and “Are you free to be my plus-one tomorrow?” and “Boss just scolded me on Zoom, I’m furious and sad, can you talk now?”)

It’s an ecstatic modern joy to be connected to your favorite people all the time, but it comes with a self-imposed pressure that’s also draining, ceaseless, and guilt-inducing.

While there’s almost nothing we value more than each other, we consistently ignore each other, while like… mindlessly deleting selfies we took in mediocre lighting? We couldn’t understand it.

Avoiding our favorite people in favor of, like, doing laundry can seem incomprehensible — we love them. But I think we’ve hit upon an aggregate exhaustion. We know that our phones deteriorate our ability to concentrate, maintain a rich interior narrative, or cope with standard boredom. And for many of us, we’ve given insufficient attention to other crucial parts of our lives to text “hahahahhahahaha” for decades.

It’s proven unsatisfying. My friend Chris told me that last year, their ex-girlfriend made a sweet request to ask if they could be back in communication after a few years apart. She lives in Amsterdam now, while Chris is still in Seattle. “I asked her what being back in each other’s lives meant to her, and she said, like, that I follow you on Instagram again and we text.” Chris was shocked. “What a mild ask.”

But to Chris, that didn’t really feel like a friendship. “This was like feeding a Tamagotchi,” they say. “I also was baffled, like why would you want more people who you’re just texting? Then I realized that so many of my best closest friends, the main platform for our relationship is mostly on text, punctuated by like two visits a year.”

I posed this dilemma to Sheila Liming, a favorite thinker who wrote a book on the art of hanging out. She echoed Naomi and blamed the design of our screens, the little red flags waving numbers of unread notifications. “I think our phones create an artificial sense of insistence,” she says. “They make it so that everything seems like it's an emergency. When in fact, most things are not.”

“There’s a love-hate relationship with our phones,” she says, “because of how they enable and also hinder our relationships.” She also pointed out that a classic double standard might be at play. While we feel confused and torn about trying to put down our phones more often, we assume everyone else is simply clutching their device, irritated or dejected because we’re not responding to them.

“Many of the people in our life are actually more understanding about the vicissitudes of relationships than we might give them credit for,” Liming says. They get it when we take a minute, because often they need a minute, too. “I think the technology itself is what tells us that it is a big deal.”

“I think our phones create an artificial sense of insistence,” she says. “They make it so that everything seems like it's an emergency. When in fact, most things are not.”

There are sacrifices to always being on your phone, which can’t go unacknowledged. I must truncate the list to avoid having a complete meltdown, but endless scrolling can cause great loneliness, envy, distrust, sadness, anxiety, and languishment (among other pleasures). You miss things when you’re blasting your brain with so much noise. One of my favorite writers, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, tells me she’s recently cut back on virtual socializing.

“I want to be a quiet body in the world,” she says. Ignoring her phone has given her this chance, and more of the mental breathing room that’s necessary for her work. But that doesn’t mean it’s without real social tolls. “I miss people so much,” Aisha says. In a statement as haunting as it is simple, she sums it up: “There’s going to be a loss either way.”

“I made peace with not having relationships that have to be through social media,” says Aisha, and the philosophy extends to more direct forms of mediated communication like texting and emailing. “The way I make peace with that is that I know I’m really present with people when I see them,” she says. “I tell myself, just because we aren’t in touch with each other doesn’t mean we didn’t connect, and that being super present for the moment we were together is enough.”

It’s much easier to justify avoiding your friends’ texts because you’re being present among humans right in front of you. Of course I do that. But even when I’m sorting my phone photos into albums for an unknown purpose except to “feel organized,” rearranging my dresses in the closet by length, or just puttering about, I don’t always want my phone bifurcating the experience.

Just as the brain can’t focus on one conversation while having another, I think that the mind simply cannot do its wild, spontaneous little wanderings if it’s constantly corralled back into a text exchange. It’s not like I’m trying to foster gorgeous insights or like, get in touch with my intuition, but I just want my mind to be unbothered. I get spiky and protective about it! And then, when these moods pass, I feel guilty and don’t understand why I wasn’t prioritizing the people I love the most. It feels particularly hard to defend.

Here, Liming offered another perspective: Fostering alone time, even of low quality, shouldn’t be dismissed because it helps you get to know yourself better. “Being alone and being good at being alone actually makes us better friends,” she says, “because we feel more confident about what we bring to our relationships.”

Still, we suffer! A cherished former roommate/very good friend/officiant of my wedding texted me that when she lets her notifications fester (never from me, she swears), “I feel like a bad friend and a bad human,” she writes. “But sometimes I’m just not in the mood.” And yet, she claims she’s unfazed when she’s treated that way by, say, me.

Almost everyone I spoke to was totally chill about being occasionally ignored over the phone by their friends. They actually admired it, they said, and thought it was good for everyone involved.

Almost everyone I spoke to was totally chill about being occasionally ignored over the phone by their friends. They actually admired it, they said, and thought it was good for everyone involved. But I also heard about one sad rupture.

A couple months before a bunch of her college friends were reuniting for a friend’s wedding, my friend Tara told me she “got the dreaded block-of-text from a college friend saying how I’d been a bad friend because I never responded to her texts or called her back.” Tara felt miserable. They live in different cities and she’d thought their relationship was just naturally fraying as time passed. “Then when we were together in the house all weekend, I was shocked that she was on her phone the entire trip. I was like, ‘Oh maybe we just like to have our relationships in different realms.’ She’s just more [on] the phone, I’m just more in person.” Sadly, the friendship proved incompatible.

I’ve kept thinking about Aisha’s summary: “There’s going to be a loss either way.”

I want no loss! And maybe this is how my phone has spoiled me. All my friends feel like they’re right at my fingertips, as is a photo of everything I could ever want to see, and all music except Joanna Newsom. But that’s an illusion. In the best relationships, ignoring each other temporarily and frequently preserves something else, something that’s hard to describe but undoubtedly an important piece of who you are — probably why your friends loved you in the first place.