Say you meet someone new. Things seem to go so well; they laugh at your jokes and you like what they have to say. Afterwards, you text them, and… you get nothing. Chemistry went to crickets in no time at all. Also, the lack of response is accompanied by a sharp sense of constriction every time you check your phone.
If you’re a millennial or younger, I’ll bet I’ve just described a familiar experience.
For the record, it’s the cycle where a) you send a text1, b) you are met with a silence that lasts longer than your brain expects, d) you feel a sharp, painful, and negative emotion when you think about the lack of response, which I will term The Crunch, and e) then you check your phone again, and damnit, still no response.
I find the idea that potentially millions of us have a similar experience of The Crunch somewhat mind-boggling. What gives? And more importantly, can you do anything about it?
Personally, my brushes with The Crunch always involve an unusual amount of self-questioning. I end up asking myself things like: Do they really like me? Are they not interested? Did I misread things? Am I crazy? Did I say anything that they didn’t like? and so on. Now I’m not the kind of person liable to get mad at the other for not responding, but my understanding is that other people do.
When I look at The Crunch cycle, the first thing that jumps out to me is that the interesting part is not the external lack-of-response situation! Over the pandemic, as I’ve had more space to pay more attention to the various internal trips my brain takes me on, I’ve spent some time focusing on changing The Crunch to be a less-distracting emotional experience. And I’ve concluded that the No Response => Crunch => ARGH I MUST / MUST I RECHECK MY PHONE cycle touches on deeper aspects of our psychology than most of us think.
One odd feature of 21st-century life is that any delay in communication is very rarely the product of the medium itself. No longer can we really blame the mail-ship, pony express, and faulty telegraph wire for the delay. We can’t just sit around hoping that the relevant response is still en route.
Way before mass communication technology, when we were still living in small tribes, communication was frequently instantaneous because it was generally face-to-face. We’re back again at nearly the speed of light, but these days if someone doesn’t get back to us, it’s very often because they haven’t yet written the message.
Though the million-dollar question seems to be “What on earth does it mean that they haven’t written the message!?” the better question is “Why does their lack of response have such an effect on me?”
As I’ll explain, The Crunch isn’t solely due to the fact that you like them.
To illustrate, I’ll give you an example, which just happens to be the story of how I figured out The Crunch. Roughly a year into the pandemic, I went on a family vacation at roughly the same time the woman I’m dating, Beth, went on a vacation with her family.
We’d been long-distance, with a healthy mix of FaceTime, texting, calls, the occasional thing in the mail… when suddenly, it felt like she started to disappear! I’d send her a message and not hear back from her for what felt like long stretches of time, but was probably no more than one to two days. What was going on!? Paranoid questions started to plague me; I could feel myself becoming more neurotic. As a relatively securely attached person, I thought I could handle her non-response for a lot longer. Was she secretly mad at me, or less interested? Did I somehow offend her? She’s a good communicator, mind you! It was very unusual, somewhat scary, and I was visited by frequent and unpleasant bouts of The Crunch.
(Side note: the pandemic undoubtedly heightened this response to an extreme degree, because — like all of us — my social connectivity narrowed to a tiny number of people, thereby raising the import of each to my well-being. I don’t remember experiencing The Crunch in the same way prior to start of the pandemic.)
One morning, as I started to play tennis with my parents, I immediately felt The Crunch pretty hard. About thirty minutes into the game, I gradually started to notice that the degree to which I felt The Crunch was well-correlated with my gameplay. If I hit a ball into the net, or missed an easy shot, I’d feel much worse about the fact that Beth wasn’t texting me back. The better my serve or forehand, the less I felt The Crunch, and so on.
What was happening is that whenever I perceived myself to be doing worse at tennis, I’d almost automatically try to counter this with internal reassurance, i.e. looking to a source of affirmation, acceptance, approval, and love, namely Beth. But because she had gone into relative radio silence mode, her presence in my mind wasn’t as strong. My traditional source of self-reassurance was lacking. The Crunch was actually related to subtle, “localized” changes in my self-esteem and self-concept. When my brain couldn’t figure out how to rectify how I was feeling about myself, I felt much worse: though the pain signified something inside myself was wrong, it wasn’t the lack of a text message. Instead, the pain signified that my self-image was in peril!
In other words, tennis would seem to have nothing to do with Beth and vice versa. But just as a tingle in one’s left arm can be the referred pain of a heart attack, this anecdote is an example of what I’ve taken to calling a “referred emotion” or “referred emotional pain,” of which The Crunch is an example. In analytically or perhaps even critically evaluating my tennis performance, I was actually ruffling my self-perception at a relatively low level. Beth’s lack of response only highlighted a) the degree to which I was critically analyzing myself, and b) the extent to which I engaged in this internal form of reassurance.
I am suggesting that The Crunch is an example of a referred emotion related to how we are already feeling about ourselves. Let me also suggest that The Crunch is more noticeable when dealing with a lack of a response with people we like because we have — rightly or wrongly — built up meaning about what their response would do for our sense of self. I also suspect it is common for people to engage in rapid forms of self-reassurance without being fully aware that that’s what they are doing.
When we discussed the episode, it turned out that Beth’s trip had devolved into chaos; there was a lot she and her family were dealing with. It also turned out that none of the things I was temporarily neurotic about were true. She still loved me :), which seems like a ridiculous thing to have ever doubted.
Practically speaking, if you are feeling The Crunch, one lesson here is to look around and ask yourself if something else in your life is making you evaluate yourself critically. Is there something else going on such that your brain wants to rectify your sense of self?
For example, maybe you are watching the Olympics and the athletic display on TV is very subtly “making” you feel inadequate because you are somehow comparing yourself to them. Maybe a social media video featuring a person you find attractive does the same thing, but you only realize it after you’ve spent another five minutes checking Twitter. Maybe you are engaged in creative output and judging what you create in real-time.2 Maybe you can easily imagine yourself doing something well, and then when it doesn’t go perfectly you find yourself in a bind. It can be a subtle pattern, especially because the mind can think quickly.
Psychology is funny – I thought that by figuring out The Crunch I had solved the / my lack of response problem. And for a long time, that seemed true. But once The Crunch was no longer present, I still felt unpleasant when Beth took a little while to get back to me more than a year and a half after the tennis game. I didn’t feel a major Crunch, but I did feel what I’ll call a minor “Grumble.” The feeling was less neurotic than The Crunch, less sharp in its intensity, but still less than pleasant. This time my mood and questions were more about what she wasn’t doing than they were about myself. That’s not a place I enjoy being in either! Turns out these things happen in layers, and once the major Crunch was cleared away, I could focus on what was left.
Essentially, what was happening this time was that the “tennis game” was my ability to engender a response. One of my core sources of esteem is my ability to form and maintain social bonds, make people laugh and cause them to light up, help generate connection and meaning, what Beth and I like to call sharing sunshine, etc. (I suspect this is a common one!)
At the same time, the Grumble I was experienced came about because I had over-indexed or focused on what Beth’s response would do for me, and not what I could do for her should she respond. I felt a lot better as soon as I focused on how I might be able to contribute to her feeling good instead of focusing on what I perceived as the lack of her response.
To put it another way, if we focus too much on what the other person’s response means for us, we can lose sight of what we can do for the other person. And when this happens, we can end up feeling worse: some part of our perceived self-value is now solely dependent on them, which is an unstable position to find oneself in.
The truth is that both parties have the potential to do something positive, meaningful, healing, etc. for the other in every conversation and interaction. When we focus on what the other person’s response might mean for us — which may or may not be helped by our active imaginations— then we can inadvertently end up highlighting their lack of response. Luckily we all possess the capacity to go from thinking about how we’d benefit to how we can benefit the other person should they respond. It’s up to them to discover what kinds of (funny, helpful, interesting, etc.) responses we can give them.
Where does this leave us?
First, I think many of us engage in the game of very subtle, rather fast self-reassurance as an adaptation to that which might be affecting our self-image. In many cases, we may be simultaneously and unknowingly exacerbating our need for self-reassurance.3 When someone isn’t texting us back, we can feel The Crunch because we are unable to repair our self-image.
Second, one of the things I’ve written about here is that it isn’t always easy to detect when one is unknowingly engaging in self-criticism. But once one becomes aware of this, I’ve found The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallway to be one resource for knowing what to do after one becomes aware that self-criticism is what one is doing.
Third, the existence of The Crunch and the Grumble suggests to me that there might be further layers — each hopefully less unpleasant than the next — that can be revealed when someone doesn’t get back to us.
Fourth, referred emotions are interesting and, to my knowledge, under-discussed. If I had called a friend from the tennis court about my Beth-related feelings, they would have likely focused on the text messaging and my relationship — somewhat akin to a doctor looking at my left arm instead of my heart during a myocardial infarction — not (my perception of) my tennis game.
Lastly, if the person who isn’t getting back to you is someone you know… If this is not in the first three or four volleys of text messages, and they are in a part of the world where they can receive phone calls, it might not hurt to try physically calling them over the phone in real life. I know, I know, bonkers right?
Thanks for reading my inaugural Mind Dreams / Substack post! What you’ve just read is part of a series about “some modern principles of psychology” which I’m excited to share with the world. In the next essay, I’ll expand on the notion of referred emotions.
Lastly, I’ll note that when writing about internal mechanisms like referred emotions / referred emotional pain and The Crunch I run the risk of mistakenly assuming other people are wired somewhat like me. For better and for worse, and especially given that I have no clinical training, there is nothing I can currently do about this but note it. Speaking of which: I’m not a clinical psychologist; please do not construe this post as medical advice.
Or volley a voicemail, emit an email, fling a fax, transmit a telegram, compose a communiqué, send a smoke signal, post a carrier pigeon... Note that I’m using “text” to stand in for any form of potentially asynchronous communication.
Though we are socialized to analyze and improve what we are doing, I believe the trick is to be aware of when we take it too far.
There is also something to be said for being in a truly well-rested place. More on that later.