I have been considering this year sending a message to all and sundry which says Dear Family and Friends if you have a problem with something I have done could you please refrain from letting me know about it in a text message? Could you please be a Man/Woman/ Decline-to-State and call me up and *tell* me that you are a) worried about something I said b) irritated about something I did or c) speculating about my feelings without me there? How do I respond to all these snarky texts? Sometimes with a phone call, sometimes with silence. Once I blocked someone.
I’ve gotten a lot of snarky texts this year. My brother complaining that I don’t want to spend time with him, after I spent three days with him over a holiday. My son, Andrew, who sent a text asking that I pay him back for the money he sent me to buy his prescription. And let’s not forget my mother who sent the to-me infamous “I am going to live my life as I want and hang out with your ex-husband” text as I was driving to the airport to attend Scarlett’s boot camp graduation.
My son Brian sent me a text complaining he was still angry about a fight that began with me putting my shoes on his bed … a month after the fact. I called him right away. I said, “Look, Brian, I’m sorry. But please, don’t send me messages like that by text. If I’ve offended you, please call.”
That call basically worked. But I haven’t always known how to deal.
The Short Answer
Snarky texts, how to respond? For my money, there are only two basic responses for snarky texts. The first one is a phone call (or deescalation text, in some cases) in which you say “yeah, I’m sorry I know I did that.” This is for when you feel you’ve done something wrong.
The second response is what I’ve always promoted as the best answer to people’s rudeness in all kinds of contexts. Silence. This achieves two objectives: you refuse to step into the rhetorical space in which the rude text exists. Like in one of those elections where there are no good candidates, you hold yourself above it all and Do Not Engage. This would be appropriate for texts when you feel blindsided by weird allegations or you feel that your correspondent is trying to take the relationship out of its actual depth. They’ve presumed too much, so to speak. Silence is the proper response.
Those are my baseline responses. However, this week, I decided to research.
Best Blogs on Snarky Texts: How to Respond
How to Respond to Rude or Inappropriate Remarks — Psyche Central
In which the writer talks about various motives for people being snarky, and various responses due to the different motives.
How Mentally Strong People Handle Rudeness and Snark — Psychology Today
In which the author argues that being mentally strong is important, because snarky behavior is contagious. Let it stop with you. Also argues that trying to figure out what is going on is a waste of time.
11 Ways to Respond to a Mean or Snarky Text Message — WikiHow
This workmanlike article goes through various quick responses of how to respond to various snarky text messages.
What About My Part?
All that is good as far as it goes. But what about my part? I seem to irritate some people this year. This feels pretty uncomfortable to admit. Some of the texts were just unreasonable. Others, I felt like I had an apology to make, and I did. But all of them came out of unbalanced relationships.
Snarky texts come from people who are frustrated and uneasy. My friends and family were not always at peace with me. I had upset the routine by getting divorced and it caused stress. One of my friends said succinctly, “Come on, Susan, people don’t like change. You got divorced, they’re upset.”
I would say that those relationships which have been really damaged by the snarky texts are those in which, if looked at closely, the people weren’t actually there for the relationship anyway. In my world, relationships are a mitzvah, a bond, and a promise. They are not scenes for emotional control, getting money, or proselytizing your beliefs and values to someone else. They are “for fun and for free.” Entered into in the deepest sense because we care about one another.
The Right Relationship Is Everything
Such relationships, generally, don’t involve snarky texts because when you really love someone, you care how they feel and you call them up and let them *know* how you feel. When I was upset with my daughter, Tiara, about her not having time to visit, I called her. I didn’t send her a snarky text. That would have made it worse.
This is what I call “showing up in the relationship.” That means, you are truly there for someone and you really care about them as a person, you’re not in the relationship just to meet your own needs.
Do I still have people who are in a relationship with me because they get something out of it? Probably. But I’m hoping it’s going to be less and less. I really want to have friends and family *be there* for me and vice versa. Hopefully, through the process of being there for others, and letting people who aren’t there go, I can have a life in which we are showing up for each other.
In conclusion, I will just say: Please, people. Snarky texts no more. If you care, pick up the phone.
To conclude this Snarky Text blog, I will link a post I found while researching of funny texts. Check out #1, #7, #15, and #21. I laughed until I cried. And laughter and love are the best medicines, right?
