You Owe Me

[joreth]

I appreciate all the ways that technology has made our lives easier, safer, all-around-better.  But there are some social trends that have resulted from some technologies that I'm really not a fan of.  The cell phone is my main bugaboo.

I've never liked cell phones.  Oh, don't get me wrong, I find them terribly convenient.  Being able to call my boss when I'm stuck in traffic to say I'm running late has been awesome.  Sending a text to find someone at a theme park when we otherwise would have wandered around for hours and *still* may never have found each other - wonderful.  Getting a short message in the middle of the day from my sweetie to say he's thinking of me can often make my day.  I still don't like cell phones.

The problem I have with cell phones is the immediacy of them and what that does to the people around me.  Because everything and everyone is available right now and right here, I find I have a strong dislike of cell phones, primarily because of what they represent.

First is getting people to stay present with me.  Thanks to smartphones, everyone around me is constantly tweeting and facebooking and googling all the time.  It was bad enough when the phone could ring at any time.  Then it got worse when text messages started getting sent all the time and no one could resist checking their text messages and immediately responding.  But now with smartphones, it seems as though I can't have a one-on-one conversation with someone without them being distracted by the internet.  I don't mean the occasional looking up a fact in question during a conversation - I actually kind of like that.  I mean sitting across the table from someone, looking them in the eye, talking to them, and having the conversation interrupted because a text, then a tweet, then a Facebook update, then another tweet, then a slew of texts, then a need to post a picture RIGHT NOW about the food on the table, all happen and the conversation is lost.  Nobody is really present anymore.  I miss that contact.  I miss that kind of contact so much that I find myself becoming very resentful of my partners' phones.  I try to cover it by always carrying a book with me, so that I can at least have something of my own to do when they are no longer being present with me.  But it irritates me all the same.  If I had wanted to read, I would have stayed home and read.  The book is just to keep me from staring off into space when my companion finds something else more interesting than me.

The other thing is the expectation that comes with all this availability.  When I was in high school (the last time average people weren't easily reached, before even pagers became popular), people had to call the house.  If you weren't home, they left a message on your answering machine, and then they waited for you to call them back.  Leaving multiple messages in a short span of time was considered very rude.  Then I convinced my mom to let me have a pager.  I wanted one so my boyfriend could send me numeric messages while I was at school, but I convinced my mom by telling her she could reach *me* when I was out with my friends.  So she would page me in the middle of the night to find out where I was.  And then she would page me again.  And again.  And again.  I had to explain to her that she needed to give me a minimum of 30 minutes to answer a page because I could be on the road.  30 minutes was the average time to get anywhere in my hometown.  If my mom didn't give me time to arrive at my destination, then I would have to pull over and try to find a payphone.  Since she was paging me late at night, that meant being a teenage girl getting out of the car at some gas station in the middle of the night - the exact kind of situation my mother was worried about that finally convinced her that me having a pager was a good idea in the first place.

This is the sort of thing I see now, only it's not restricted to worried calls from my mother.  If I don't answer an email fast enough, if I don't respond to a Facebook post fast enough, if I don't answer a tweet, if I don't respond to a text in an amount of time that the other person thinks is "appropriate", people get really testy about that.  Never mind that I could be hanging from a steel beam holding something very heavy over other people's heads.  Never mind that I could actually be out of the house and my computer is still at home and still logged on.  Never mind that I could be having one of those intimate conversations where I'm trying to give someone my undivided attention.  Never mind that I could be sleeping, or showering, or fucking, or pooping.  I have to respond RIGHT NOW.

I'm waiting for some repairs to happen in my bathroom.  It will take my shower offline for 3 days, so I've requested that the repairman schedule the repairs so that I can make alternative accommodations for this.  Last week, the repairman showed up at my house first thing in the morning.  I was still sleeping, having had a late night and still having company.  So I didn't answer the door (I didn't know it was the repairman at the time).  About an hour later, while I was occupied, there was another knock at the door.  20 minutes after that, I got a phone call that I let go to voicemail from the building manager telling me they wanted to schedule the repairs.  5 minutes after that, my dad texted me, asking if I was OK.  Since it was my dad, I texted back that I was fine, and he said that the landlord had called the emergency number to find out where I was.  Then I got in the shower.  Then there was another knock at the door while I was in the shower (the shower window, by the way, is on the same wall as the door and since the window was open, anyone at my door could tell I was in the shower).  Then my dad texted again that the landlord called back!

A mere 2 hours after the first knock, when I was awake and dressed and ready to deal with business matters, I finally called the landlord and chewed her out for coming by a total of 4 times, calling 3 times, and calling my dad twice, all without previously scheduling the repairs as requested.  This is what I'm talking about.  People expect other people to be available all the time, even without making any arrangements for it.  I have an OKC inbox filled with first-contact emails and a second, follow-up email of guys pissed off or hurt that I haven't responded to them.  No "I'm sure you're probably busy", no "is everything OK?" - it's all "fine, I can take a hint, the least you could do is tell me that you're not interested and not just ignore me!"  Entitlement.

You are not entitled to my response.  You are not entitled to my availability.  Also, there is nothing about me that is passive-aggressive and even a cursory look at my profile would tell those guys that if I wasn't interested, I wouldn't just *ignore* him.  Plus, if I was ignoring him, whining about it isn't likely to end well regardless.

The latest incident was an ex-mistake of mine.  I call him my stalker, and it's a long and convoluted story how a stalker is also an ex.  The "short" story is that we've known each other since we were 12 and he decided the moment I walked in the classroom door that I would be the girl he married.  He spent the next decade putting himself in the friendzone, i.e. a friend with ulterior motives.  He was my friend for the purpose of getting close to me in the hopes that I would one day realize that he was my soulmate.  I didn't know this at the time.  This is the antithesis of being a nice guy, although every single guy who does this calls himself a Nice Guy for doing it.  He tried every juvenile trick in the book to get me to date him.  Eventually, in college, I did date him, and very quickly learned what a bad idea that was.  After we broke up, he put himself back in the friendzone.  I genuinely prefer to be friends, or at least friendly, with my exes if we broke up simply because we were incompatible & not because he did something unforgivable, so I didn't see a problem with him trying to be friends with me ... at the time.  That took me another 6 years to learn.

By that point, I had discovered polyamory and had moved across the country, so my interaction with him was limited to phone calls.  We'd have very pleasant multi-hour-long conversations, until he'd point out how well we were getting along and wasn't that enough proof that we were destined to be together?  We'd have an argument, and I mean an ARGUMENT complete with shouting where he tried to convince me that we were two halves of the same whole, that I was doing this poly thing only because I was still searching for Mr. Right and I should stop searching because he was right there and I would yell back that I was not interested, that I loved my then-boyfriends, that I was not happy being monogamous, and that our dating was a mistake I never wanted to repeat.

This is more backstory than necessary (and yet only a fraction of the story), but the point is that I spent the majority of my life being hounded by this guy to marry him (complete with him sabotaging the condoms in the hopes that I'd get pregnant, as I learned later) and yelling at him that I didn't want to be with him.  I had finally had enough.  In a phone conversation while I was at my then-boyfriend's house (so I have a witness to it), my stalker started in again on being soulmates and I told him that I was never going to have that argument again.  I told him that I was not going to contact him ever again, and he could not contact me unless he could refrain from starting that argument, and if he ever DID bring it up again, I was going to change my number so he couldn't ever call me again.

About 6 years has passed and I have not contacted him.  He has sent me 2 emails and friended me on Facebook (but not actually contacted me there).  The first email was an essay he wrote for his creative writing class where he described our 2-decade relationship from his perspective.  I've written about that before and how shocked I was to learn that someone who had known me for years & claimed to love me could know me so little (he still believed that my poly relationships were casual sex and that I only did poly because I was "promiscuous" and wanted to have lots of sex with lots of guys ... how he could miss my regular months-long spans of no sex drive is beyond me, but I digress).  His second email was to tell me that his brother had been convicted of murdering his own wife & child, and how my stalker felt his life was falling apart.  That's another long story I won't go into here, but let's just say I wasn't the least bit surprised to hear the news.  For both emails, I did not respond, since he explicitly said "you don't have to respond, I just need someone to listen".  He then promptly emailed me back after both to whine about getting "the hint" from my silence.  Both of those I responded in the same way, to remind him of our last conversation and that he said I didn't have to respond.

Yesterday, after I had publicly posted on my timeline that I was unplugging for a while to go be productive, he sent me a message on Facebook.  Naturally, I didn't respond, as I had walked away from my computer.  He sent me 2 more passive-aggressive messages about getting "the hint" from my not responding.  I got the messages this morning and sent him yet another reminder that I wasn't interested in speaking to him, however my "silence" was because I was not at my computer and that I didn't owe him a response according to his time table.  It's a funny little quirk I have, not prioritizing responses to guys who treat me as an object, who put me on a pedestal and ignore my own wishes for my life, and who think that arguing with me about dating is a good strategy for winning me over.

So, I am increasingly disturbed by the sense of entitlement people seem to have over other people's time.  Maybe people always felt that entitled and the cell phones are merely a new tool to facilitate that entitlement, and I shouldn't blame the cell phone or turn it into a symbol of that entitlement.  All I know is that people seem to demand other people's attention, and other people's responses, and any irritation at being so demanded is met with a counter accusation that it's somehow the other person's fault for not being available and the other person is an asshole for having a problem with the demand.  It feels as though nothing can wait for more convenient times, everything has to be done now and if you don't want to do it now or, Zeus forbid, you're busy with something else, well then you're a jerk.  If you don't want to answer your phone because you're at work, or otherwise occupied with someone else, you're a dick.  If you want your partner to actually finish the conversation, or the date, before surfing Facebook, you're selfish.  If you dare to walk away from the computer while it's still logged on to email or social networking sites, you're inconsiderate.  And if you have the nerve to actually tell people that you have other things to do and can't respond right away, then somehow you are the self-centered prick who thinks the world revolves around you.

So if I don't respond to something you've said to me, or emailed me, or posted to me, or texted me, or called me, it's because I'm fucking busy with other things to do.  I'll get to you when I get to you, as I expect you would for me.  If what I'm contacting you about is urgent, I'll make sure you know it's urgent.  Otherwise, if you don't answer me back, I'll assume that sitting with your phone in your hands waiting for my message was not at the top of your priority list and something else was, something like eating, or sleeping, or any of the dozens of people in your life who are closer to you than I am, or work, or pets, or an emergency, or it was a pretty day outside so you just left the damn phone in your pocket for a while, and NOT that you're sending me some coded signal that you don't like me.  Whatever, respond when you have the time and if you feel like it.  You don't owe your time to me, but I'll appreciate whatever time of yours you're willing and able to share with me.