This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.
How’s your day? Love you!
Love you too.
A simple text message exchange with your partner can take all of 10 seconds. Yet those little pings could be key to relationship fulfillment, says Department of Communication Arts associate professor Catalina Toma, who studies how people relate to one other through communication technologies.
“They actually make a huge difference,” Toma says. “It’s a phenomenon we call mundane talk or everyday sharing — all those behaviors that keep a relationship alive.”
While we tend to think of the gestures that keep romance thriving and relationships thrumming as grand or expensive — long talks, bouquets of roses, fancy dinners — Toma says texting and direct messaging on social media can be “major players” in the maintenance stages of relationships.
When you’re interacting face-to-face, you have a variety of cues to pick up on, from your partner’s choice of words to his or her voice inflection, pauses, facial expressions and body language. Perhaps surprisingly, Toma has found that reduced-cue environments like communicating via text messaging lead to higher levels of satisfaction in couples.
“Impoverished environments let us fill in the blanks,” she explains. And when you have positive feelings toward your partner and feel secure in your relationship, you tend to assume those blanks are filled with love, appreciation and other good things.
Of course, you can fill those blanks in negatively, especially if the relationship is new or struggling. A cryptic message can feel unnerving if you don’t know the sender’s true feelings, and you can read the worst into any text if you’re angry with or don’t trust your partner.
But in strong and healthy relationships, brief messages checking in, expressing love or sharing an inside joke — any simple “thinking of you” signal — can further strengthen couples’ bonds and increase satisfaction with each other and their partnership.
“Even a short text can be seen as a sign of attention and love,” Toma says.