Rule of Thumbs: Love in the Age of Texting

My thumbs becoming so tired.

Initially, texting with him was thrilling. Wherever I was -- on assignment, at the airport, out with friends -- his sweet messages triggered butterflies. It was like talking, or flirting, but better. We were always only a few keystrokes away from communicating at any time, night or day.

But soon that became the problem.

On the day of my birthday bash, he texted me that he was "uncomfortable" with our relationship and that we needed to talk before the party.

Say what? We hadn't had a fight. I called him. No answer. I called again and again and again. Finally, he answered with some lame excuse. I'm still not sure exactly what the problem was.

Repeat scenario. Add water and stir. He often seemed unable to articulate what made him mad or uneasy. But that didn't stop him from firing off messages accusing me of not communicating. Me. The girl who likes to hear or see the person she's talking to.

The final few weeks before we broke things off were a blur, one long string of digitally delivered angst. Once upon a time, drunken dialing could ruin a relationship. Ha. Try getting drunken, misspelled texts at 3 a.m.

What was I to make of this? According to Barb Iverson, a professor of new media at Columbia College Chicago, the latest technology revolution means that there are now two kinds of people in the world: "digital immigrants" and "digital natives." The digital immigrants came of age before the technology revolution and they struggle to adapt to the new language, rituals and protocol. The digital natives instinctively emote through their thumbs and don't consider a relationship "official" until their Facebook or MySpace profile says it is.

Then there are the Gen-Xers like me who are somewhere in between.

In the United States, we have come fairly late to the texting game. The Chinese, who embraced this technology years before it arrived here, send 300 billion text messages a year, and the number is rising. Half the 13- to 15-year-olds in Australia own cellphones. In Japan, some experts have noted that thumbs are growing physically bigger and people are now using that digit -- and not the index finger -- to point and ring doorbells. Texting is so prevalent that Japanese teenagers are called the "tribe of the thumb."

Anthropologist Bella Ellwood-Clayton studied texting and dating in the Philippines, which she calls the texting capital of the world. In a 2005 study, she detailed how it works: A man might send an innocuous text message to a woman. If she replies quickly and with warmth, the texts back and forth increase in familiarity -- and innuendo. "It is also a fairly nonthreatening way to initiate communication with someone versus a phone call or face-to-face methods, which demand greater bravery and often directness of intention," Ellwood-Clayton noted.

As we catch up here in the United States, we are grappling with the social implications that come along with texting.