It never feels good to fight, but really feels bad when you’re fighting with someone who lives far away. Even on the telephone, it seems like you can’t be clear enough and unnecessary insult can heap upon needless injury.
You might be fighting with a sibling, a grown child, a spouse or friend, and after you both hang up – well, what do you do now?
Now, someone must pick up the phone and take the chance. If you are the one making that move, you know you might be rejected, yelled at or even just be hung up on. It’s a hard decision to make.
So, what would happen if you texted an apology first? Texting an apology must be wrong! I know, it sounds like a complete cop out, but hear me out.
If you text first and the other person shuts you down, it doesn’t hurt as much and you both know that an effort was made. If you text first and the other person responds in a way that says, ‘I want to resolve this’ the door is now open. But before you dial their number, consider this:
Whenever we text or chat, we must compress ourselves to communicate as much as possible in as few words as we can. This format forces us to apologize succinctly. We can’t use euphemisms, or we probably won’t, because it takes too many keystrokes to beat around the bush.
So we just say it: “I’m sorry.”
And here’s hoping the other party responds in kind.
But now comes the really good part. If you intentionally uncompress yourself and you ‘spend’ a lot of characters giving a really heartfelt review of what happened and how much you want things to go back to the way they were, this shows the other person that you care enough to text a long message–spelling out all the words. Take as long as you can apologizing, clarifying and re-bonding.
It seems kind of strange that we’re already wired to expect text messages to be short and full of emoticons, slang, shortened words and symbols and most of all, to be disposable. So, a longer text – completely typed out- says on a subtle level that you really care – and you really mean it.
Nothing says “I don’t really mean this” more than: plz 4gv me.
The last benefit of texting an apology is the lasting benefit: you can read it over and over again, and relive those feelings as the matter was resolved, hurt feelings were cleared and the person you were fighting with showed you that they really preferred to be your friend and would gladly spend the characters to tell you so.
(and now you’ve got it in writing!)
