by Dear Diary, I sent a genuinely quite good text last night, the kind I’d drafted twice before sending, casual on the surface but secretly engineered within an inch of its life, and he replied in under a minute. A minute. I had time to feel proud of myself for roughly forty seconds before the reply came through and completely destroyed my whole strategy, because now I had to respond quickly too, and quick responses are not where my strengths lie.
I read once, in a piece I still think about more than is probably healthy, that my wit simply does not load in time under pressure, and last night proved that theory correct with embarrassing precision. I stared at his reply for four minutes, composed and deleted six different responses, and eventually sent a single laughing emoji, which is not wit, which is a white flag dressed up as punctuation.
What I actually wanted to say
The version of me that exists only in my head, the one who is quick and charming and never once sends a laughing emoji as a substitute for an actual thought, had at least three genuinely funny things queued up. The version of me that actually exists, sitting on my bed at eleven at night with my flatmate’s telly bleeding through the wall, managed none of them. There is apparently a very specific kind of confidence that only arrives roughly ninety seconds after the moment it was actually needed.
He didn’t seem to mind the laughing emoji, to be fair. He sent back something equally underwhelming, and somehow that made me feel better rather than worse, the two of us clearly matched in our shared inability to be impressive on command.
The bus stop reminder
This whole small disaster reminded me of something I wrote about ages ago, when I got chatted up at a bus stop and it turned out to be the best part of an otherwise entirely unremarkable week. That conversation worked precisely because neither of us had time to overthink it. Standing at a bus stop, you say the thing that comes to mind, because the bus might arrive at any second and take the whole opportunity with it. Texting gives you infinite time to overthink, and infinite time is, it turns out, the actual enemy of anything resembling charm.
What I’m doing differently from now on
I’ve decided, entirely unofficially and probably unsustainably, to give myself a strict ninety-second limit on any reply that matters. Ninety seconds is apparently enough time for a bus stop conversation to go brilliantly. It should be enough time for a text message too, in theory, assuming I can actually stick to a rule I’ve made for myself roughly four hours ago and have already broken twice while writing this entry.
We’re meeting for a drink on Thursday. I have three and a half days to prepare several backup jokes, which somewhat defeats the entire point of the ninety-second rule, but self-improvement, as I understand it, happens in stages.
The backup jokes, ranked so far
I’ve got three drafted. One about the laughing-emoji incident itself, which feels almost too honest but might land precisely because of that. One about my flatmate’s ongoing, extremely vocal opinions on my entire love life, which is reliable material because she genuinely does not hold back. And one I’m saving entirely, refusing to write down even in this diary, in case it’s actually good enough to use and I don’t want to jinx it by overthinking it in advance the way I overthought the original text.
Priya thinks I should lead with the emoji story. Priya, it should be said, has strong opinions about most things involving my dating life lately, most of which turn out to be correct, which is somehow more annoying than if she were simply wrong occasionally.
What Thursday actually needs to go well
Realistically, the jokes matter less than I’m currently treating them as mattering. What actually made the bus stop conversation work wasn’t a rehearsed line at all, it was simply not having time to rehearse one. I suspect Thursday will go fine regardless of whether I use any of the three drafted jokes, purely because showing up slightly nervous and mostly honest has, so far, worked out rather better for me than showing up armed with material ever has. I’m bringing the jokes anyway. Old habits, and all that.
An honest postscript
Writing all this out, I’ve realised the actual anxiety was never really about the ninety seconds at all. It was about caring whether he’d like the reply, which is a considerably more ordinary and less fixable thing than a slow typing speed. No rule about response time changes that part. I’ll keep the rule anyway, mostly because having a rule, however silly, feels better than simply sitting with the caring and no plan for it whatsoever.
What Thursday will actually decide
I keep telling myself this is a low-stakes drink with someone I’ve been texting for a fortnight, nothing more, and mostly I believe it. But there’s a small, quieter part of my brain already planning what I’ll say to Priya afterwards depending on how it goes, which suggests I’ve already decided this one matters more than I’m currently admitting to myself in writing. I’ll know by Friday morning either way, notebook update to follow, presumably with rather less ninety-second panic attached to the retelling than to the original event.
