Getting Pleasure Out Of The Painful Talking Stage With The ‘Boy and Girl Texting’ Meme

Romantic nuance is a communicative minefield, one so notorious that there is an entire canon of art dedicated to documenting it. As times change, so do the forms it comes in. Where Elizabethan poets dedicated themselves to the craftmanship of the sonnet, today, memers around the net have every webcomic and stock photo they can find at the ready for their lovelorn reimagining.

Such are the origins of the Boy and Girl Texting meme, an exhaustive dissection of the talking stage. It offers a delicate balancing act, its simple comic setup taking meme culture mainstays like the iMessage screenshot, Seen Notification and You Can’t Reply to this Conversation but putting them in a more human context. At the same time, artist Ari Nunnunano’s style produces an uncanny valley effect, giving each character empty black holes for eyes and blank, unchanging expressions.

Its outcomes are often brutal. Under its Spanish origins, its alternative name is “Bloqueado” or “Blocked.” Many of these versions portray one of the two texters writing something that repels the other person in some way, although as with many relationship memes, the move will occasionally work out (or at least lead to a one-night stand). Either way, it is a format that gains its success from one crucial thing: the illustration of a tipping point.

For anyone ever left wondering what they did to deserve ghosting, Boy and Girl Texting isn’t there to explain it — but it will catalog just how embarrassing you’ve been, celebrating the fickleness that modern dating allows us. Its success as a meme is in it making clear how differently we can perceive our own realities and how the line that seemed effortless in your head was outrageous in practice. While the meme may honor our ability to get the ick, it also resents all the contemporary social fads that bring it on, whether that be asking for nudes or commenting on astrological placements.

The original versions of the meme predate the pandemic by only a couple of months, and it has experienced a recent resurgence on renowned Instagram meme accounts like Patia's Fantasy World. Its continued popularity speaks of the times we find ourselves in, wherein many countries single people bored and/or lonely enough to play the field find themselves worrying over how long they should take to reply without even the payoff of a mediocre in-person date. Boy and Girl Texting resonates on this relatable, "stuck-in-the-house" level but at the same time takes us back to a freer moment, when you could brush someone off and still plausibly daydream about a romcom meeting with the love of your life in your local coffee shop.

On one level, this format can attribute its popularity to the fact that it doesn’t have many competitors. However, it does have a strikingly similar counterpart in the form of Doomer and Doomer Girl, providing the necessary components of awkward interaction that, with a few exceptions, often ends in rejection. The two memes even rose in popularity at a similar time. It doesn’t come as a shock that the two have even seen a crossover, one prominent example emphasizing how heavily both formats rely on the consumer’s cultural knowledge and what that represents.

What has permitted both to considerable influence at the same time is that they cater to different audiences. Doomer and Doomer Girl plays to those for whom dankness matters, evidenced by the alternative aesthetics of both characters and their wider connection to the Wojak extended universe. To understand their relationship is to ease yourself into an entire lifestyle of meme lore.

Meanwhile, Boy and Girl Texting is proudly generic enough to make someone tap twice on their Explore page without thinking too much about where it’s come from, or how long it will be around for, while at the same time having the versatility to make them do it again. It’s a more low-maintenance form of relatable, in much the same way that this format doesn’t really dive below the surface emotions of its protagonists (as opposed to the deep-seated sadness and disappointment implied with the Doomer).

Overall, that is the beauty of this format. It lets us step outside our experiences without wringing our hands over what we did wrong, or as with the Doomer and Doomer Girl dynamic, internalizing our failures as grim inevitabilities. Its protagonists are frequently childish, but Boy and Girl Texting acts as a reminder to grow up — and on the rare occasion that one of its characters gets something right, that you shouldn’t stop yourself from taking that chance either.

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