Why I'm Happy To Be Married: Reasons That Have Nothing To Do With My Husband

I met my husband because we were introduced by a mutual friend. The three of us had lunch at the work cafeteria. I initiated a group outing to see Michael Moore speak. He invited me to an Elvis-themed party. There might have been email flirting. I am sure there were phone calls. And the anxiety! Does he like me? Are we hanging out as friends? Are we going on dates? Those first few weeks we started dating… I was very unproductive at work.And all of that was plenty hard enough. All you people dating today? Good God am I sorry for you! The digital world adds so much more complexity and so many extra layers of potential anxiety. Yuck.

I might have thought about this in passing before, but I recently read an early edition of He Texted: The Ultimate Guide to Dating in the Digital Era by Lisa Winning and Carrie Henderson McDermott. I learned a lot but the most important think I learned is to feel grateful to not be participating in the current dating world.

Bear in mind that the book is targeted at the ladies, though I think a lot of it could be used by guys as well. If this is information you choose to use at all. So, some other things I learned:

Twitter is not sexy. Do whatever you want on Twitter, but know it isn’t a place that’s going to help you hook up.
Instagram is for youngsters (defined as under 20 in this book, which is galling) so cyberstalk all you want but don’t try to flirt and whatnot.
Tumblr? I don’t think the authors get Tumblr so the general theme was you can do whatever you want on Tumblr.
Have you heard of Tinder? I am sort of fixated on it because it sounds crazy to me. An elaborate game of Hot or Not. Anyway, nary a mention of it in the book so I have no rules to share about Tinder.
Facebook? Holy moly. That’s where the rules kick in.What I took away is that you need to assume if you friend a potential dating partner on Facebook that they will look at all of your pictures with the goal of checking you out in a bathing suit and verifying you have a life and friends. There was some detail about how to react to guys liking your statuses and whatever. Essentially, the takeaway was that people need to chill out and not react too much to someone clicking the Like link or commenting. And if someone likes all your stuff and comments all the time? Creeper. A solid piece of guidance was that people shouldn’t Friend on Facebook until they get to know each other in person. That way you can build impressions based on what is real versus what is posted online.

As the title implies, the main focus of the book was on texting. The authors founded HeTexted.com and it’s sort of a big advertisement for the site as well as a treatise on what they’ve gleaned from users on the site. I feel like it rehashed a lot of the whole “He’s Not Into You” advice from 2009. If you think a guy is dumping you on text, he is. If you think he is creepy in text, he is. If you think he is trying to get a booty call via text, he is. And when you try to rationalize otherwise? You are wrong.

I thought this book was pretty hilarious. I often read aloud parts to Wonder Boy. I learned crazy stupid slang I never need to use like breves (abbreviations), exclams (exclamation points) and F2F (face-to-face). There are others. You won’t feel smarter for me listing them all out.

I have a couple real issues with He Texted. First, there are a few parts where they are so specific about technology that the book was out of date about a week after it was published. When not as specific, they still list so much about technology that the book will be out of date about two months after publication. The brobassadors (I am not making that up) who share the male perspective throughout the book come off as douchebags, though occasionally their advice seems spot-on. The whole take on dating seemed to be pretty traditional in terms of guys calling the shots and making the first move. I guess I thought we moved past that a long time ago but maybe not.

He Texted is not all bad. I would not recommend this to many people at all, but there are a few where I think, “You need to read this.” You have friends always agonizing of the interpretation of every piece of electronic communication they get from a potential boyfriend / girlfriend? Just give them this book so you can stop hearing about it. It might actually help.