Communication in the world we live in

This morning my husband asked me if I’d seen the bill we’d been sent by email that he’d forwarded onto me. I haven’t! And even when I looked at my emails, I couldn’t find it! I get way too many emails in my personal inbox and even though I try and unsubscribe from many of them, I still get too many from the companies and people I do want to hear from! As a result, lots of emails get lost and don’t get seen. Good luck if you are a friend sending me an email – it’s extremely likely to get lost amongst all the other traffic.

The bill my husband was referring to has, up till now, always been sent by post. For me, that’s a much safer and assured way of getting it to me. I’ll open it, know what it is and even if I file it somewhere temporarily, I’ll pretty much always know where to find it.

I have a dear friend who is 40 years younger than me. Her main method of communicating with everyone is via Snapchat. My preferred method is WhatsApp. I have tried Snapchat but since I only want to use it to communicate with this one friend, I just haven’t been able to get on with it.

I’m part of a pantomime group in our local village. Their main method of communication is Facebook Messenger, but I don’t like Facebook, and I don’t do Messenger, so I miss a lot of the messages that are posted.

So, what does all this have to do with dating?

The examples I’ve given above from my personal life are all examples of communication failures – where someone has sent me a message – which I am genuinely interested in receiving – and which because of the medium of the message – I have missed.

In dating it’s really the same.

So often we hear our members say, “well I sent him/her an email/text message/WhatsApp etc and they’ve not got back to me, so they obviously aren’t interested right”?

Well absolutely not. Have you considered your message may well not have got through as you’d expected? Just because you live on your email, or are always connected to WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger or whatever, your preferred means is… doesn’t mean the other person is as connected as you are.

So, when someone doesn’t reply to you, rather than thinking, they aren’t interested, first ask yourself whether you can be 100% sure they’ve received your message. Quite often they simply won’t have.

Just last night I was on the phone to a lovely member who’d written to six people from her first set of profiles. None of them had replied to her. She was clearly disappointed but then went on to tell me one of them (from Ireland) and her were now in a lovely relationship – he was planning to move to be with her in Scotland – and marriage was definitely on the horizon. So how did this come about I wondered given none of the six had replied and she’d been so despondent. It turns out the man she’s now seeing had a phone that he rarely turned on and that phone was where his emails were – and it was only weeks after she’d emailed him, did he find her message.

As I said with all my examples at the beginning, I think this is very common – even when you really want to get other people’s communications.

So please really give this some thought and don’t give up on people if you’ve sent one communication and you haven’t had a reply.

Needless to say, if you’re putting your phone number and email into your profile, then do make an effort to look for messages from other members.

This is not a plug for letter writing but I must say, all this trouble with modern-day communication and the multitude of ways available to us now to communicate with each other, does make me a fan of letter writing. It may not be quick, it may take much more effort, but it’s pretty much guaranteed to reach the recipient and the effort is always appreciated.

I hope as ever this gives you food for thought.