A topic that often comes up, directly or indirectly, in couples counseling is how partners interact with each other via text.
At times, texting back and forth is very convenient. When the issues at hand are transactional and straightforward, it’s obviously the way to go.
However, it’s not uncommon for couples to have very long, drawn-out arguments that can literally take hours to type back and forth. Some will complain about the adverse effects on their workday.
Is Texting Helping or Hurting Your Relationship?
I’m not here to advocate in either direction. But I’d like to throw out some questions you can ask yourselves as a couple.
Here are a number of sentence stems you can use to figure out why the two of you communicate the way you do, and how you’d prefer to interact:
- We often communicate via text because _____________
- It’s helpful to let him/her know how I feel via text when ______________
- What I find annoying about communication via text is _______________
- It’s crucial for us to talk in person when ____________________
- I often text my spouse, rather than speak in person, because I’m avoiding ___________
- I often overanalyze the texts my spouse sends by reading into _______________
- My husband misunderstands my emojis when ___________________
- My message gets lost via text when __________________
Just for Fun: True or False
And, just for fun, I’ll throw in a couple of true/false questions:
- True or False: _________ I count the number of exclamation points my spouse just sent
- True or False: _________ I sometimes wonder if communication was simpler in the 1990’s