It's a measure of how quickly our phones have changed our lives that we are collectively still struggling to understand the powerful role they play in our relationships.
And in particular, the special chaos and agony that can emerge from the falsely innocuous, tangled, and yet, in reality, infinitely complicated business of what we too casually know as texting.
For most of human history, contact between parted lovers had a real simplicity to it.
One took one's leave at the platform or harborside in London or Amsterdam, Cape Town, or Sydney, and then had no option other than to wait for weeks, possibly months, or even years to hear from the beloved again.
It made for a deep, but also unavoidable and entirely impersonal kind of sorrow.
One was forced to miss the other person at a rate and rhythm sharply constrained by geography and technology, by the length of time a coach took to negotiate the Saint Bernard Pass or a schooner to sail the Straits of Gibraltar.
The situation has been transformed for modern lovers, for better and very much for worse.
By offering us constant, seamless contact, our phones have simultaneously opened us up to perpetually renewed opportunities for doubt, disconnection, and anguished speculations as to the loyalty and interest of the other person.
Exchanges have become live ceaseless referenda on our worth and value.
When divorce lawyers are nowadays called in, and assets coldly split up, the true cause is often an irreconcilable, hard-to-mention drama about read receipts and the dance of those three blinking dots.
