Are text messages the new love letter?

I’m walking down a closed off Sixth Street, it’s 6pm and the street is packed and smells of heat dried booze and Kabobalicious wrappers. I’m already deep into my seventh or eighth drink of the day and trying to maneuver through the sweaty mob without ever looking up from my iPhone. They say that when you lose one of your senses that the others are heightened to compensate for this loss. I have lost my ability to take my eyes off of my iPhone, which means that my body has naturally taught itself to parade through a crowd without ever looking up. This is South by Southwest and there is a lot of business to be done. And, of course, by “business” I mean “networking” and by “networking” I mean having an excuse to get drunk with every major record label and production company executive in the nation, all within the course of a week. Organizing this kind of networking booze and schmooze is no easy feat, which is why I’m simultaneously having 30-50 conversations at the same time via text message, while I feverishly enter party times and venues into my iCalendar. The iPhone has changed the way I live my life. And I’m not just talking about raising the efficiency of my networking skills.

It’s 2am on a Friday night and while many of the bars are closing down, the ones I want to go to are just now opening. That’s the advantage of attending an event with after hours parties all sponsored by Red Bull. The down side being that injecting that much Red Bull into your body in so short a period of time can make your texting thumbs a little jumpy and the iPhone starts predicting words that you might have wished it didn’t. I’m sure Steve Jobs will figure this one out soon enough. As I pound Red Bull number six of the day, I’m texting back in forth with a lovely young lady I met the night before. Of course, she and her friends, like anyone else addicted to fun, are headed to yet another Red Bull party on the East End. We’ve been back and forth in text convo for the past 14 hours and while I’ve only met her once, and I never rearranged my schedule to do so, I feel like I now know her better than anyone. In saying this, I could be right. You see, the thing with falling in love via different forms of social media is that it is easy to get right to the point of things. When you have a few seconds to choose your words, questions and answers wisely, then getting to core information like birth date, place and time are questions that don’t seem inappropriate at all. Of course, this can then be plugged into an Astrology chart reader via Safari and voila! You now know that this is the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with, the stars have predestined it.

Okay, so perhaps its not exactly like that, but it’s similar. If I meet someone at a bar and we communicate the way that people traditionally do, then it could take me months before I figure out if that person is even someone that I want to hang out with, much less fall in love. But, if I implement a little text message Q&A, then without wasting any time whatsoever, I can ultimately learn as much about a person as I want to, or as they are willing to share. Over the course of 14 hours, I was able to learn more about this particular girl then I knew about previous girls that I had dated for months. Because of text messaging, I was able to get ALL of the formalities and “Hi, how are ya’s?” out of the way and move directly into the “So, we’re pretty compatible…” stage of our relationship. Is this the future of dating? Are text messages the new love letter?

I like to consider myself quite the romantic and I’ve been known to write my fair share of love letters in the past. That’s just something that I enjoy. But, in the past, even via mediums like email, Facebook and MySpace, it still takes a long time to get to know someone well. God forbid I go to the grandiose gesture of hand writing all of those letters, it would take me years to really get to know someone and in the letter format, it’s way too easy to build a romantic caricature of yourself. Which means, when you finally do hang out with this person, they aren’t who you thought they were a lot of the time. With text messaging that is also true, but not nearly to the same extent. Text messaging allows that you are much more candid, but still comfortable. I can’t spend an hour carefully crafting my answers in a text message, or I could, but it wouldn’t make for much of a conversation. Text messaging takes all of the positive things of writing a love letter and all of the positive things of getting to know someone and combines the two so that everyone can decide if they really like each other in a time period that is much more conducive to our run and gun society.

So, can you fall in love via a text message? I think I might have already fallen in love several times through text messages. But, if nothing else, I have certainly created a much stronger bond with people in a much shorter period of time. And, at the same time, I have opened up a very efficient line of communication. Over the past month, I have started communicating with many clients via text message and find it to be much more efficient than email or phone conversations. Text messaging has in a matter of weeks completely streamlined the way that I do business and interact with clients. Of course, there is a time and place for face to face meetings and phone conferences and MySpace and Facebook. But, I’ve been amazed at how much and how quickly information can be communicated through a simple text message. In under five text messages, I can communicate the equivalent of ten back and forth emails and completely cut out any of the fat. Text messaging makes business and personal interactions lean, which allows me more time to put towards providing my clients with more value, or falling in love with strangers.

Send me a text and find out what I’m talking about first hand…512.785.9160.

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