I have one close friend that lives in town that I see a lot, but the rest of my really close friends live all across the country. I used to do photography for this company based in New York, and became friendly with someone I worked with there, but we never met in person. And most of those people that I hung out with from work don’t even live here anymore. It’s become another inside joke because we’ll be driving, and the car will read it to us like, ‘Text from HOLE, HOLE, HOLE.’ So we call ourselves Holes now.” - Julia, 33, 10–15 text threads per day We think we named it that because grad school felt like an abyss, but we’re not sure. The name of the group chat is three hole emojis. There’s four of us from grad school - my really close friend from college, her husband, and two other friends. “I have one text conversation that’s pretty relentless. You have more time with it.” - Molly, 28, 10 text threads per day
You can also say things that you don’t necessarily want to say to someone’s face, because you can phrase it in a more delicate way. You grow up with it and there’s a shorthand. I’ve been doing this since I was 13 years old, so it’s its own language, essentially. “I think over text you can be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit funnier. Desperate to learn if my best friend was a freakish anomaly or if I was underperforming, I went looking for people with super-active text-based social lives to tell me how - and why - they do it.
I consider myself a prolific and adept texter, but I only average between three to six active text threads on a daily basis. What I did not expect was that there were, like, 20-plus others.
Or, okay, I thought there were maybe two to four others. She’s so quick to reply, so present in our little text window, that it sort of shocked me to learn that I am not, in fact, the only person she’s texting all day, every day. Though she spends half the year in Brooklyn, where I also live, we don’t usually see each more than once or twice a month - not because we don’t like spending time together, but because we love texting each other. My best friend and I text all day, every day, and it’s been this way for almost ten years.
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