I have a habit of sending Husband a Whatsapp message from another part of the house. Or neighborhood. Or sometimes because he isn’t listening when we are in the same room. In my defense, our townhouse has 4 floors and I try to discourage shouting from one floor to the next. 

I use four different texting programs depending on who I am texting. I choose which texting platform based on who I am texting, their preference, and what I am sending. I like features of all of them, but no one application does it all. NumberOneNiece likes SMS messages. BestFriend introduced me to Whatsapp. Even Facebook messenger has features, like reply to a message with an emoji, that I find useful.

I often say that I am an interrupt driven system. Once I have sent a message, I expect one back within about 30 seconds. This expectation is rarely met. So, with Husband, sometimes I have to go to a different texting platform to send the message, “I sent you something on Whatsapp.” He has a fitbit that is supposed to alert him, but it doesn’t always vibrate. When I switch to SMS, I have to figure out which phone number to send it to so it has the best change of interrupting whatever he is doing so he will pay attention to ME.

This seems like a simple problem, but in some relationships, it could be the beginning of the stage where divorce proceedings are the end. I hope I have more patience than that. 

Back when we were at Purdue together, Husband was BoyFriend, and he tried to convince me the “r” key was broken on his computer, and that is why he couldn’t respond to my email messages. (For those who don’t get that, just know that email was different when it was command line based.) (For those who don’t know what command line is, well, I’ll try to write an FAQ on it sometime.) After almost 30 years together, I have had to accept he has less emotional investment in answering me than I do in getting an answer from him.

This appears to be a technology problem, but it is really a difference of expectations and a difference of self managing expectations. I let a friendship die about nine years ago because Hangouts failed. Letting the friendship die is on me. Having a friendship that was so fragile is on both of us.

When I started this, the point was to make fun of myself for going to another platform so quickly that it has to annoy the crap out of Husband. And yet, there seems to be more to take from this story:

1. Interrupt Driven Systems don’t make the most reliable friends.
2. Sometimes, you have to use alternate routes of communication if you want to be sure the message gets across.
3. Patience is not one of my virtues.

Communication takes a transmitter, a receiver and a medium of transport. This is true whether we are talking, text, emailing, sending physical letters or holding hands. All of those parts might fail in any situation. Be cautious to not let the first failure destroy the message.

-r.f. macmorris