Before You Send That Text

You have a message drafted. You have read it four times and it still seems reasonable. The fourth read is the tell. Nobody reads a normal text four times. Put the phone down. This is shorter than your paragraph, and it is about you, which is more than your paragraph can say.

1. Phase I

   Identify what you are actually holding.

   That is not a message. It is a request for a response that will make the feeling stop for about twenty minutes. You know this, because you edited it twice and read it back in her voice. Communication does not require a rehearsal. You are not informing her of anything. You are managing your own nervous system and using her as the equipment.

2. Phase II

   Know why you keep doing this, then stop hiding behind it.

   She replies sometimes. Warm, then distant, then nothing, then warm again. A functioning adult reads that pattern as "not interested." Your brain read it as "precious." That is intermittent reinforcement. It is the same mechanism that runs a slot machine, and right now you are the man at the slot machine at 1 a.m. explaining to himself that this pull is different. It is not different. The machine does not know your name. And in this story, she is not the machine. You are.

3. Phase III

   The sunk cost is already gone. The text does not buy it back.

   You have spent the time, the attention, and several months of mental rent. The paragraph feels like it might win some of it back. It will not. You are not making a withdrawal. You are topping up an account that has never once paid out and was never going to.

4. Phase IV

   Hold.

   Do not send it tonight. Go to sleep. The draft will be there in the morning, and so will you, and you will read it once in your own voice this time, and you will not send it. That will be the first correct decision you have made about this person in a while.

It is not a message. It is a request for a feeling to stop. Do not send it.