Can You Fall in Love with Someone Through Text Message? | Hacker News Reader

Can You Fall in Love with Someone Through Text Message?

venngage.com

47 pointssnake_case39 comments

If it wasn't possible I would not have met my wife 12 years ago. Well, at least if you count IRC as text messaging :-)

Well, it's messaging using text.... so yup!

You can fall in love with anyone through anything! It is all in your head. ;-)

This happened to me many times as a teenager.

If you have never met someone, the problem is that we many times only show one side of ourselves through text only...and often times, it's different than reality.

We would meet up after weeks or months of email/texting and the person would be completely different in terms of the fantasy portrayed online.

After this happened a few times, I had a rule of meeting the other person within 2 weeks or move on.

Been happening for centuries. Plenty of letter correspondence romances.

Can we please stop using early 2000s "txtspeak" to signal text conversations?

Does anyone still write "ppl" or "to" => "2" in the era of autocorrect?

> Does anyone still write "ppl" or "to" => "2" in the era of autocorrect?

Yes. I still receive messages from many people (who I know have smartphones) with "u", "ur", and so on.

I do this, and some of my friends still do too. It's nostalgic fun for those of us that can read it just fine. Of course, I only type like that with people I already know. r u going 2?

Nostalgic fun is a good way of putting it. I find myself doing this sometimes with friends as more or less a joke. If people outside my closer group of friends do it I actually find it pretty annoying.

Everyone I know does this and it annoys me no end. Worse; a lot actually put those 'abbreviations' in actual serious letters (resumes.......) as well. And these are not stupid people, just young.

Edit: and actually, with autocorrect people (all ages) are made lazy enough to leave the wrong word if the autocorrect misfires. Leaving the reader to guess the correct word altogether.

You mean twitterspeak?

The people that still use flip phones do. Not everyone is on the forefront of technology.

It's a good way to see who's been texting before phones allowed you to bypass the 140chat limit and reconstruct multiple messages into a single one.

Additionally it's also a good indicator of some one who uses Twitter way to much and has either polluted their autocorrect with this shorthand or have way too much confidence in their grammar and spelling skills and just hove autocorrect off.

Sounds like there's reason to think that a video only Tinder-style app might succeed; instead of sending text messages to your matches, you'd send them video messages. You'd probably need some kind of face recognition built in to only allow videos containing people's faces to be sent (to avoid obvious user experience problems that would be present in an anonymous dating app).

And within 2 min some one will paint a face on their ding dong and bypass your image recognition system.

I met my now wife at 15 in high school, and we definitely fell in love over AIM during the summer.

The only relationship I've been in to date - a long-term one that ended a few years ago - basically started over AIM, texting, and the occasional late-night phone call. After several months of that we made it official.

LOL, my teen did several times.

Hahaha

I didn't read the article, but texts messages are a common form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). I studied this a bit during my undergrad, and one of its more interesting effects is that it does seem to be significantly easier to form strong emotional bonds when utilizing CMC rather than more traditional methods. A compelling theory as to why is that people generally tend to assume that the unknown elements of the person with whom they are communicating are likely to closely align with their own ideals until proven otherwise.

Of course it's possible, but the text message has to be crafted specifically for that person. Like an exploit.

I posit that for most people there exists a well-crafted SMS that immediately connects with them. The problem is it may be really hard to figure it out. :-)

Incidentally, I have recently watched the movie Groundhog Day, which also explores this theme to some extent.

Interestingly enough, I think the message in Groundhog Day was that the "perfect message" theory works for shallow relationships, but totally failed for true love.

I agree. Of course, eventually, the SMS will have to be backed up. But if you are interested in shallow relationship, you can make someone fall in love with you at least temporarily. I don't think it's a moral thing to do, but it's possible, and people do it.

It's been two hours this has been posted and no one has yet self congratulatingly posted a wikipedia link to a certain law about title's ending in question marks. I'm proud of you guys.

You did. Just in a very paraphrasing way.

No. When you communicate via text, email, etc you perceive the message in a tone that fits what you want. Somebody you consider irrational will come off with an aggressive tone. Somebody you want to laugh at your jokes and be happy around you will come off in a happy mood that conveys they enjoy your presence/company.

I don't see how that excludes someone falling in love. If you want to fall in love, you'll perceive the messages you receive as loving.

Let me clarify then: falling in love requires two people sharing the emotion. Deciding you love somebody else when they don't reciprocate can happen anytime, anywhere, for any reason.

Deciding you love somebody else when they don't reciprocate can happen anytime, anywhere, for any reason.

So... it can happen over text message, then?

Touche.

In that format it becomes 2 people projecting reciprocation. You wouldn't be able to find out if there was any substance to it until they tried to stay together.

Falling in love with someone does not require both people to share the emotion.

For example, person A can fall in love with person B, even if person B hates person A. In fact, person A might fall even deeper in love with person B if person A is a masochist.

"in love" implies you both love each other.

He loves her. She loves him. They are "in love".

Otherwise it's one or the other.

Nope. You can "fall in love" and it not be reciprocated.

In that case, we're talking about 2 totally different things.

People can fall in love with an idea if it doesn't have to love you back.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

http://f.cl.ly/items/0D2y420L2t2t1W3c000I/love.png

• a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone: it was love at first sight | they were both in love with her | we were slowly falling in love.

If anything, I think that makes it easier. Maybe it's just me, but I already had a problem with idealizing people when I meet them, morphing them into a better image, and it's even easier online because of the lack of direct cues

It's not specific to text. If someone has a tendency to misconstrue others' emotions they can do that anywhere.

I DO fully believe it is true for a lot if not most people, especially those that didn't grow up on text communications.

Personally I'm much more emotive over text and it's much easier for me to pick up emotional cues over text (unless I happen to talk to a person that's really bad at text). And I'm pretty certain it's true for increasingly many people born in the last 20 years.

Teenagers are always certain of things they have no way of knowing. It is not a generational skill, just a common foible of humans at that maturity level.

That's why emoticons/smileys exist!

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