Promiscuous With Intimacy

Sometimes the world seems blurry to me, recognizable and somehow not, and because I spend so much time wondering about it, I am thankful to have a place for those thoughts to go.

There are so many conversations I wish I could have. So, oh my goodness, how gracious is this space for me to converse with air.

And since the air cares not at all if I speak, well, to the air I can wonder about anything. And so...

I often wonder if texting has made us too promiscuous with intimacy.

It is strange to think how much has changed inside the simple act of asking for someone’s number.

Once, the exchange meant you might hear their voice.

Now, more often than not, the first thing that arrives is a text.

And almost without noticing it, the exchange has become something else too.

A  little doorway into someone else's day.

A way to reach them without calling. To speak without hearing their voice. To enter without requiring either of us to stop what we’re doing.

Perhaps I should be more unsettled by that than I am.

Because I have begun to wonder what we lose when so much of another person reaches us through words we cannot hear.

There is something deeply human about knowing another person’s voice.

Not merely recognizing it.

Knowing it.

A voice is such a peculiar thing. So common a human possession, and yet unmistakably our own. An instrument each of us carries around without giving much thought to how much of ourselves it reveals.

Given enough time with someone, you begin to learn their personal acoustics.

The rasp when they have just woken up. The breathiness when they are in a rush. The lower register they slip into when something is serious. The quicker rhythm of excitement. The little suspension when they are considering what to say.  To me, it's all so magical.

In time, you know their song well enough to notice when it is slightly out of tune.

A pause where there usually isn’t one.

A laugh with something unfamiliar folded into it.

The almost imperceptible alteration that tells you something has gone tender or wrong even as they insist that nothing has.

No one teaches you these things.

You learn them by fine-tuning your ear to them.

Conversation after conversation. An hour in the car. A phone call that went longer than intended.

This kind of intimacy cannot be hurried.

It accumulates almost accidentally.

And one day you realize that you no longer merely recognize a voice.

You have learned the sound of them.

Perhaps this is one of the more intimate ways we can truly know another person: not merely remembering what they have told us, but knowing them well enough to hear what they haven’t.

And somehow, almost all of the sudden, black letters on a screen are asked to bear all that we entrust to them.

And I’m not sure their tiny, spindle-like backs were sculpted for it.

The human frame, however, is well acquainted with weight.

We can bear what happens when one person actually encounters another. The tenderness and the discomfort, the delight and the wound.

Texting does give us the wonderful gift of someone’s words. Oh-so many of them.

We can be given an astonishing amount of another person and remain strangers to the sound of their hesitation.

And texting does not merely leave out the voice.

It gives us time to edit what replaces it.

On a phone call, you get to experience a person in real time. Their laugh happens before they can contain it. So does a moment of hesitation. The awkward silence. The inelegant thing they say and then have to recover from.

Texting gives us an interval.

I can feel something, reconsider it, erase it, rewrite it. Add an exclamation point so I sound  a bit warmer. Add a laughing face so you know I was joking.  But was I really...

I can read your words, have an authentic Stephanie reaction to them, and send you something considerably composed.

You never have to know.

So texting doesn’t merely remove the voice.

It introduces careful composition between two imperfect human beings.

And then, rather wonderfully and ridiculously, we try to put some of the missing humanity back into the story. A tiny yellow face laughs for us, another cries, a heart arrives where perhaps a half an octave would have changed.

Frequency creates familiarity.

And familiarity is seductive.

It resembles intimacy closely enough to fool us.

Of course, not every exchange is reaching for intimacy.

Sometimes what we enjoy is simply the attention.

But attention can become its own appetite.

Oooooo, that thought has teeth. I’ll let it flash them and move on.

Texting is, after all, a remarkably low-investment form of communication.

And forgive me, I don’t mean low-value. A few words arriving on the device I carry tucked into my ripped jeans can be terribly tender.

I just mean that very little is required of us to send them.

Communication once asked for a little more friction.

You went somewhere. You called. Sometimes you even crossed a few states just to sit across from someone. You stayed long enough for the afternoon to disappear.  And maybe even another. 

You wrote a letter, sealed an envelope and bought a stamp, then surrendered the whole thing to the postal system like a Victorian woman with a secret! 

Yes, communication once asked something more of us.

Time. Attention. Inconvenience.

Birthdays are perhaps my least favorite example.

A name appears in a group thread and one by one the little greetings arrive. Happy birthday! A heart. A cake. A string of balloons.

By evening, twenty people may have acknowledged that you ran around the sun again without a single one of them having heard your voice.

Everyone thoughtfully remembered.

Everyone reached out.

And somehow no one had to come any closer.

The wishes are beautifully sincere. I have sent them too.

But the message can so easily become the completed act.

Communication happened.

I'm less certain connection did.

Which may be why I have told people, at times, that I would genuinely love to hear their voice instead.

And something interesting happens.

Sometimes I hear from them less.

Then less again.

And then, not much at all.

I don’t take that to mean they never cared. Perhaps some relationships simply grow accustomed to ease.

A text can be slipped between things.

A phone call asks you to stop.

It asks for your voice. Your attention. A portion of your day.

When ease falls away, something about the relationship comes into view.

Not necessarily affection.

Not necessarily care.

But how much of ourselves are we willing to invest.

I don’t think texting has made us less sincere.

And I don’t think the little messages we send one another are meaningless.

I'm rather fond of them.

But perhaps true intimacy was never meant to cost so little.

Perhaps it has always required some surrender.

And perhaps it is something slower.

A willingness to remain near enough, long enough, and curious enough to learn what another person never thought to tell us.

Until we know when I’m fine means exactly that.

And when it does not.

Until somewhere along the way, without meaning to memorize it, we have learned the instrument.

Perhaps that is its own small romance.  Someone making the room for you somewhere other than close to the edge. 

Goodnight, air.

In no great hurry,

Stephanie