I hate texting. While I do think it can be a fun way to chat or an easy way to convey information, it’s definitely not how I want to have an actual conversation. Digital communication, though, got many of us through the hardest moments of the pandemic. With the coming of winter and the uptick in Delta awareness, some of us are starting to slow down our in-person hangs, but that doesn’t mean we want to go back to having an all digital life. I also don’t want to come off as some kind of rude luddite who ghosts people in the face of armageddon, though, so I asked an etiquette expert how to end a real time text conversation gracefully or, better yet, how to avoid one altogether.
“The best way to end a conversation with someone is to tell them that you’re ending it,” Elaine Swann, a Los Angeles-based etiquette expert, tells me. “You can simply say, ‘I’m hopping off, I’ll get back with you later.’” The simple elegance underlying this strategy is genius, and it’s also honest, which is something that’s important to most of us. One of the weird things about communicating in the digital age is that everyone knows that you have your phone near you, but they also know that you may not actually be available, says Swann, which means that we all have to be a little more direct about expressing our boundaries.
