In an age when phone calls are as outdated as gaucho pants, texting has become a part of our everyday lives. While we ladies can decode each other’s text messages without batting an eyelash, we’re more than a little puzzled on why guys don’t share our same love for emojis and exclamation points.
It’s clear to see that guys approach texting way differently than girls do. Here are a few of the differences we found!
Emoticons
Ever notice that there seems to be a serious disconnect between guys and girls when it comes to the subject of emoticons?
Girls
Whether we’re texting our girlfriends about going out for drinks later or simply asking our boyfriend how his big test went, you better believe we’re going to include a corresponding emoji to go along with our inquiry. A boring text that could simply read, “hey, how did your test go?” becomes 10 times more interesting when you add a book emoji, a pencil emoji and a few happy faces just to spice things up, and your simple “wanna get drinks later?” is so much more exciting and intriguing when you follow it with a few martini emojis and a classic winky face.
“I use emojis because they make my texts sound more exciting,” says Hannah, a junior at the University of Washington. “Emojis just make texts so much less serious and [more] fun. I would never use them when texting an employer or someone I worked with professionally, but when I’m texting my friends or a guy I like, I always throw one in there.”
It’s a girl’s worst nightmare when she starts texting a new guy and the dreaded green text message appears. No iMessage means no iPhone, which in turn means no emojis – how is she supposed to let him know she’s crying from laughter at his last joke if she can’t use the crying-from-laughter emoticon?!
Taylor, a junior at the University of San Diego, is also a big fan of emoji use in her texts. “I have my favorite emojis that are always my go-tos whenever I’m texting,” she says. “I kind of just use them without even realizing it! When I’m texting someone and just want to have a fun, lighthearted conversation, they’re a good way to lighten the mood. I use the heart-eyes emoji way more than humanly necessary.”
With a plethora of emojis at our constant disposal, we can find a fitting one for any text message we send, which may be why we constantly overuse them. No matter who she’s talking to or what the situation is, a girl will include emojis, and if you don’t like it, you’ve got a “whatever girl” emoji coming your way.
Guys
While guys may not often feel the overwhelming urge to add endless amounts of heart emojis to their text messages, that doesn’t mean they avoid them at all costs.
“I don’t really get the point of emojis,” says Tyler, a sophomore at the University of Washington. “To be honest, I usually only use them if I’m texting a girl I like and she keeps using them.”
Sometimes you’ll find that overzealous guy friend who shares your mutual love for emoji-filled text conversations, but more often than not, you won’t get more than a classic smiley face out of a guy unless he’s totally into you. Emojis just aren’t a instrumental part of a guy’s texting routine; they’re only reserved for the most special of occasions.
“I kind of feel like emojis are a little emasculating, and I know a lot of my guy friends feel the same way,” Tyler says. “I think emojis are more of a girl thing, so if a guy constantly uses them it might make him seem a little feminine.”
Safe to say if that guy you like sends a kissing face emoji your way, you’re definitely on the fast track to love… or at least a casual froyo date.
Abbreviations
Guys “def” aren’t as dialed into texting lingo as we girls are, and sometimes that can just be a really big “prob.”
Girls
As determined, young collegiettes, we live pretty busy lives. With our club meetings, class projects, internships and homework, we need to make the most of our time, which is why we totes abbrev everything we text (plus it makes us sound SO much cuter).
“Fabulous” gets shortened to “fab”, “oh my God” becomes “OMG,” “be right back” turns into “BRB” and “ily” becomes the new way to let your BFF know that you so totally love her. It’s like a secret texting language that only girls can truly understand and appreciate.
“Abbreviating words when I’m texting has become so second nature to me,” Hannah says. “I especially notice it when I’m texting another girl friend, because we feed off of each other. I personally think abbreviating words is pretty fun, but whenever I accidentally text my boyfriend using typical girl abbreviations, he always tells me to stop because he thinks it’s annoying!”
When your best friend texts you to tell you that she’s “supes jelly” (super jealous) about the fact that your new boyfriend is “totes adorbs” (totally adorable), you know exactly what she’s saying. Show that same text to a guy, and he may ask why you mentioned jam and handbags in the same sentence.
It’s only a matter of time before they make a Rosetta Stone program for girl-texting lingo.
Guys
There are very few guys out there who would text their friends to tell them that their spring break trip was “so fab” or follow up an exciting text with, “OMG no way!”
“Again, guys think that abbreviating words while texting is also kind of emasculating,” Tyler says. “It’s not very manly to say ‘OMG’ in a text message, so I think that’s why most guys choose to not use phrases like that when they’re texting.”
Guys like to keep their texts short, simple and to the point without all that complicated texting lingo to accompany it. Boys are, more or less, completely oblivious to the many abbreviations we girls use on the daily, and frankly, they don’t really understand them.
“Sometimes I don’t even understand some of the stuff my girlfriend texts me,” says Ryan, a sophomore at Oklahoma State University. “Girls have so many weird abbreviations they use I can’t even keep up. I feel like they make up a new one every day.”
How guys can write out the word “perfect” without feeling the overwhelming urge to abbreviate it to “perf” is a mystery to us all.
Response Time
It’s been three hours, and the guy you’re flirt-texting still hasn’t responded. What gives?
Girls
We ladies have no problem with making sure our text message responses are prompt and timely. Sure, we may spend a few minutes screenshotting a text, sending it to our friends and asking for their advice on what would be the best, flirtiest, most nonchalant way to respond, but we never leave a guy hanging for hours on end.
Our valiant effort to be prompt isn’t always reciprocated, however, and our male texting partner’s failure to text us back in a timely manner leaves us with a plethora of time to sit and think up some pretty crazy reasons why the guy isn’t texting us back.
“I always respond to people’s text messages pretty much right when I receive them, so I never understand why it sometimes takes guys hours before they respond,” Taylor says. “I understand that sometimes people forget or they’re in the middle of something, but you would think it wouldn’t take them hours and hours to respond!”
Unless he suddenly fell into a coma or spontaneously fell off a cliff, there’s no excuse for him to not text you back immediately, right?
Guys
Let’s face it, guys aren’t always the best at immediate text responses, and no, it’s not because they’re playing hard to get.
“Sometimes I really just forget to respond to a text or get distracted after I open the message,” Tyler says. “I never intentionally take a long time to text someone back; sometimes I just don’t remember to for a few hours.”
Guys don’t seem to feel the same urgent need to promptly respond a text message, which is exactly why it often takes them so long to respond to our carefully crafted, emojied-to-perfection texts.
We may not have the same texting habits, but that’s okay! We’ll leave the guys to do their own thing while we sit back and see how many cat emojis we can fit into one conversation.