@JoshuaDolin
Suggestive semicolons ;)
“Well he has a boyfriend, but I think he is flirting with me,” I said.
“Why?” my friends asked.
“Because he uses smiley faces and winky faces in his texts!”
This conversation that I had with my friends one night is probably similar to talks that you have had before as well.
Flirting used to be easy to identify because men and women would laugh way too loud, smile constantly, unnecessarily touch each other and/or flip their hair. Now, however, flirting can be done simply by combining two punctuation marks together in a text message.
This confusion recently came up in my life when I met Phillip.
Phillip was a physicist from Colorado who was working for the summer in New Mexico. He was tall, muscular, intelligent, nice and also very much in a relationship. He seemed perfect, but after experiencing what Bradford had done to me, I swore that I would never be a part of breaking up long-distance relationships.
But what is cheating in this modern dating atmosphere? Phillip and I would text every few days and meet up with friends, and in his texting he would flirt. I didn’t flirt back at first, but he was attractive and interested in me, and I was in no position to turn that away.
“Look at this text!” I told Maggie over drinks that night. Phillip texted me this: “Well if you go, at least there will be one attractive guy there. :).”
The text message alone is flirtatious, but then there is the smiley face. I suppose it isn’t exactly a smiley face, but technically a colon and parenthesis. Those two punctuation marks put together have redefined flirting in relationships.
I have to imagine what it was like for relationships throughout history before we added winky faces and smiley faces to the end of love letters. That emoticon can say more than the entire message!
To me, adding a smiley face is nothing but flirtatious. They mean one thing and one thing only- “I’m interested in you.”
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Collette reserves smiley faces and winky faces exclusively for people she is interested in dating. “I only send them if I want the other person to know that I like them. It’s just an easy way to be cute and flirtatious without telling someone directly that you like them,” she said.
Ashley and Alice took me to get Chipotle on one of our sibling nights, where they also agreed with me.
“You could send a text that says ‘Good morning. I hope you have a good day,’ and that means you are friends,” Ashley said. “But if you send a text that says ‘Good morning, I hope you have a good day :),’ that means ‘I want your D.’”
Alice, my only friend who is currently in a relationship, agreed with Ashley.
“I send them to my boyfriend, but only because it is cute,” she said.
And these punctuation marks only make her relationship more positive because they can increase feelings for her and her boyfriend.
Winkey faces are even internationally recognized as the simplest way to flirt.
After putting on a face mask and getting ready for another night alone, one of my best friends from Australia, Miley, asked if we could Skype. She told me that there was a guy who liked her and one night he sent her a simple text message. So simple that it only said “;).”
“I asked him what that text meant,” Miley said. “And he said that it meant that he missed me.”
So whether you live in New Mexico or Australia, it seems to me that a winky face means someone is interested in you. I am still very confused about whether people always have that intention when they send them or not, however.
My roommate Maggie is also confused and hates them even more than I do.
“This guy uses them in all of his texts to me! What do they mean?” Maggie said. “They are especially foreign to me because I don’t use them. Originally they used to be used between friends for fun, but in this new dating dynamic it’s dangerous to use them because they can be interpreted in so many ways.”
And then there are those people who just use them as a cute thing and add them to every text. Is that what Phillip was doing? Or was he flirting?
Collette, who is also trying to find the perfect guy, told me to directly ask Phillip. I went and had a drink with him the following night, but only to ask him about his boyfriend.
It turns out that Phillip and his boyfriend are in an open relationship, so he was in fact flirting.
Over in San Antonio things had gotten confusing for Aurora also.
Her dream guy, Jason, had not only stopped sending flirtatious punctuation in his messages to her, but he had actually stopped messaging her altogether.
Where did she go wrong? Did Jason find someone else to send suggestive semi-colons to? And if he did, was it her fault?
Could she fix it by sending him more smiley faces in her texts?
Aurora finally thought that she found a guy she had previously only dreamed about, and it was over before she knew it. It ended because he stopped texting her.
Now that relationships rely so heavily on text messaging and electronic communication, is all punctuation safe? Or, can one colon and one parenthesis be #suggestivepunctuation?
