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Darren.
    STEPHANIE: Hey, Darren, how are you?
    DARREN: I’m good.
    DARREN:
[long pause]
    DARREN: Okay . . . Bye.
    But soon you’d get better. With time, you’d realize how to be confident on these kinds of calls. You’d have a funny anecdote or conversation piece ready. Witty banter would be at the tip of your tongue, and soon you and Stephanie would be two verbal fencers parrying and riposting it up like this:
    DARREN:
Hey, Stephanie. It’s me, Darren! [confident, energetic]
    WOMAN: Hey, Darren. This is Stephanie’s mom. One second . . .
    DARREN: Shit. [quiet]
    DARREN: You got this, Darren. You got this. [quiet]
    STEPHANIE: Hello?
    DARREN: Hey, Stephanie. It’s me, Darren! [back to confident, energetic]
    STEPHANIE: Oh, hey, Darren. What’s up?
    DARREN: I just got an umbrella!
    STEPHANIE: Cool . . .
    DARREN: All right, bye!
     • • • 
    Well. You’d get better than that.
    The skill that went into making a phone call to a romantic interest is one that younger generations may never need or want to build.
    As our technology becomes more prevalent in our lives, romantic behavior that seems strange or inappropriate to one generation can become the norm for people in the next one.
    For instance, in a recent survey 67 percent of teens said they’d accept an invitation to prom by text. 2 For older generations the idea of getting invited to something as special as prom by a text message may sound cold and impersonal. It seems inappropriate for the occasion. But younger folks live in a text-heavy environment and this shapes their perception of what is appropriate. For example, in a topic we’ll revisit in more depth later, breaking up with someone via text seems pretty brutal to people of my generation, but when we interviewed younger people, several said their breakups happened exclusively by text. For younger generations, who knows what texts lie ahead?

    THE RISE OF THE TEXT MESSAGE
    Texting, otherwise known as Short Message Service (SMS), was thought up by Friedhelm Hillebrand, a German engineer, in 1984 and achieved for the first time by Neil Papworth, a young British engineer who messaged his friend “Merry Christmas” in 1992. Alas, his friend didn’t reply, because his mobile phone didn’t allow him to input text. 3
    Sure it didn’t. That’s the same shit I hear from friends who don’t respond to my mass “Merry Christmas” text. I even throw in a custom image every year; peep this one from 2012.

    That said, can you imagine how insane that must have been—to get
the first
text of all time
? When no one knew what a text was? It would have been like “WHY ARE THERE WORDS ON MY PHONE??? PHONES ARE FOR NUMBERS!!”
    In 1997 Nokia introduced a mobile phone with a separate keyboard, setting things up for the BlackBerry epidemic that would soon afflict most of the global yuppie community, but it wasn’t until 1999 that text messages could cross from one phone network to another, and after that usage began to rise. In 2007 the number of texts exchanged in a month outnumbered the number of phone calls made in the United States for the first time in history. And in 2010 people sent 6.1 trillion texts across the planet, roughly 200,000 per minute.
    Technology companies have introduced all kinds of new services to help us exchange short messages, and we’ve responded by tapping away like never before. And of course, this has translated to a vast increase in the number of romantic interactions that are being carried out over text.
    One reason for the spike in asking people out by text is that far more of us have smartphones with big screens that make messaging fun and easy. According to consumer surveys, the portion of all American adults who owned a smartphone went from 17 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2014, and they’re most prevalent among those emerging adults between ages eighteen and twenty-nine, 83 percent of whom carry a smartphone wherever they go. 4 When we’re not doing traditional