Say It With Sexts

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These days, the quote takes on new meaning: less a pithy quip and more like the global mandates to keep our populations safe. But there is an exception to this: I have uncontainable crushes on all of my friends. They are the people I will allow in my house. And I love telling them how much I love them. An expression of unbridled love between friends is tantamount to the deepest romantic affection.

Sometimes, this love swells in texts. One second, we’re talking about the cinematography of a TikTok. The next, it looks something like this:

I live for these exchanges; I preside over a kingdom of blue chat bubbles full of these feelings for my pals. They temper the Saggittarian worry in my heart that my obsession over my closest friends isn’t as deeply shared, or that somehow it will scare them off. Here’s an exchange with another friend of mine.

As I’ve grown, these connections have blossomed into something that never feels like a substitute or a stand-in for the love of the romantic ilk. Romance lives in the crevices of all meaningful relationships. Sex is great. But have you ever had a friend breathlessly tell you how much they miss you? How deeply they want to be in your arms or stoned on a couch with you once “this is over?” Phew.

Aaron Edwards is a writer. He's currently working on a television script and trying to befriend a squirrel in the Hudson Valley.

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Obviously, the most romantic movies are the ones in which someone is trying to kill Michael Douglas. All the films I have in mind—Fatal Attraction, The War of the Roses, Basic Instinct, Disclosure, The Game, A Perfect Murder, and Don’t Say a Word—predate sexting, texting, and sending nudes. It really ratchets up the intensity. If Glenn Close could have just texted Michael Douglas the perfect selfie In Fatal Attraction, would she have tried to destroy his entire life? Well...huh. Actually, yes, I think she still would have. She simply would have had more paints on her palette, so to speak.

It’s not the lack of technology that inspires this Michael Douglas-murder drive, but an operatic lifestyle. Erotic thrillers are often considered neo-noir, but they’re operas. Love is a matter of life and death! In fact, in Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close tries to kill Michael Douglas because he won’t go with her to Madame Butterfly—an opera about a coward who abandons a beautiful, interesting woman for a boring one. What a dick!

That’s why I’ll be sending all the people I adore a special YouTube opera clip as a Valentine. The Armani-costumed Cosi fan tutte for my menswear heads; Kiri Te Kanawa singing Mozart in the craziest magenta bow dress for my couture purists. Maria Callas crying will go to the closest friend I haven’t seen since last January; Montserrat Caballe’s “Casta Diva Norma” to my sweet mother; and this mini-documentary on Caballé’s rivalry with Callas to my two closest frenemies. Freddie Mercury and Caballe’s bizarro duet will go to my “work husbands.”

This is the only way I can take my dear ones to the opera now, so I see it as an act of love...but also of protection. I’d much rather be the killer blonde than the philistine Michael Douglas, who risks his life by refusing to submit to the drama.

Rachel Seville Tashjian is a magazine person living the dream in the Big Apple. Her Valentine is the hunkiest guy in art.

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I’ve been with my boyfriend for eight and a half years—at once the most and least normal fact of my twenties. Partnering early and for good is unremarkable in the greater historical scheme of things; and yet, the experience distinguishes us from every other thirtyish-year-old I know. For exactly half of that time we lived in separate cities, a long commuter train ride between us. Those years required a lot of relating by text message: with him during the week, and with everyone else I love on the weekends when I’d visit him.

Verbal economy is how we work. He and I are both big talkers, but not primarily to each other. So our texts have always been tender but terse, to the point—quickly reported facts and feelings. In the years apart, our closest thing to a ritual was a final message before sleep, sent by whichever of us got there first. Goodnight baby, or goodnight lover, 😴😴😘😘: a narrow vocabulary with few variations, befitting a tight-lipped romance.

In its snug pen of language, our love grew up. Post-adolescent histrionics mellowed into something steadier. Goodnight baby—a blank screen onto which my younger self might have projected veiled slights or hidden subplots—cured me of melodrama. The phrase became soothing in its reliable simplicity. The routine kept our lives tethered, but loosely. Sometimes it re-synchronized us across state lines, confirming that our daily business would always lead back to each other.

But it also dramatized the space between us, especially if he or (more often) I was still out, caught in the day’s propulsion. Goodnight baby lit up my phone on bar counters and friends’ couches and the corner of my desk, reminding me of his office job and healthy habits, the different rhythm of his life. I’d wave at the text’s intersection and continue on my way.

For the last two or so years we’ve lived together, having both alighted on New York. Pre-pandemic, the goodnight text resurfaced on independent weekend nights: a rope tossed across boroughs from our bed to the party. The two words are our purest vehicle for tone, whether inferred or imagined. They’re a way of keeping our distance—Goodnight baby, as in, I’m here, but stay there—or of closing it. Goodnight baby, as in, I’m here, come home.

Sam Huber writes about literature, feminism, and queer culture for Bookforum, The Nation, n+1, and other publications.

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I talk a lot, but I’ve been accused before of failing to say what I want. Desire has an obnoxious habit of making my mouth open and throat close. When I have to say something I tend towards text. I sent my first love letter in the fourth grade (I can’t remember its contents, but I included one of my favorite baseball cards in the envelope; the sport was a shared obsession). At this point there’s a paper trail going back decades binding me to who and what I wanted.

In person, what leaps to my mind in the moment are clichés: I want you, I missed you, kiss me, etc. It always feels too nonspecific even though I mean it. In a letter I say it better. It’s easier to translate from my subconscious, which is, for better or worse, a sap. I want you, yes, but also: here’s the us I’m thinking about now and here’s how I remember you. The scenes I recall are less often sex than something near it: the feeling of my belt being being pulled back through its loops or the already hot light of a late morning in summer on someone’s skin as they slept. Maybe that’s too much, but by wanting I’ve probably always meant having a hold on my memory. I remember my hand on your back and I want to see it again.

I’m easier on the receiving end. Just make it plain. Every I want to see you soon is enough. Still, I think writing is best as a prelude to presence. A text about waiting in bed—well—that hits differently in better times. Videochatting is too awkward a substitute. If I want you then I want to see you, look away and find you there again, everything else dissipating. A screen is too sharp for that and the letter can’t stand alone. It only said what I might forget to say later.

Someone once asked me if I, in Orpheus’ position, would have turned my head. I responded “Yeah, probably. I check in.” She said, without looking at me, “I think men often don’t trust things they can’t see.” I wanted to argue, but I’d already confessed to her point. There was nothing to say. I looked at her instead.

Blair McClendon is a writer, film editor and filmmaker. He lives in New York.

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Perhaps love is a thing that transcribes desire across time. I think how it has never been more possible to lay bare the gestations & mutabilities of a loving—never more opportunities, more tools, to track its unfurlings.

It is Sunday & I am seeking a moment—when I knew you knew you loved me. I long to dissect that instant; pin it under glass; seize a quality of light, power-drunk; determine the me-ness of me there to ascertain the origin of your irruption of feeling. I should like to know how to inhabit that girl, be her, forever; she who is quiet now, as our past selves are ineluctably quietened in time’s passing.

Darling I document everything to hold you nearer; thinking: records might prove the thingness of a thing; the incandescence of our love. Might our detritus, should I hoard it, drown the world’s banging horrors out?

I erase nothing. I need all of you & everywhere.

I comb through texts, my diaries, trying to identify & dissever that moment from the others. What moment. Is love so reducible.

I grasp at gestures; little sighs; the thrust of your hips this night or the other. I say when you come in me it is like being possessed, utterly. I dream of John Keats & Fanny Brawne; remark how simple, how horrifying it must be to have loved only in letters.

I know when you first said the words. That night we biked through Red Hook. I’d tried to hop a curb, chasing you, & had fallen, pavement meeting palms before a baseball game underway. The moms checking on me; me gasping it’s ok it’s ok. Then weeping in your arms. Later, your love was a balm.

Or the day you sent me that song—from McCartney II, though you knew I knew you knew I am no Beatles fan. Still I decoded the lyrics, found you there, regarding me.

We conduct so much of our romance through screens.

Google Drive intercepts the songs you write me.

The cloud harbors my nudes, selfish.

Perhaps I should lament these things. But I am here; I have so much of you; for all time.
Once I wrote how none of my exes photographed me; how I felt phantasmatic; a trace at the edges of their lives.

But you photograph me. A sort of reality is conferred. The solidity of my lovable body in your entire world.

Jamie Hood is a poet, essayist, memoirist, & miscellanyist. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Peach Mag, The New Inquiry, Teen Vogue, & Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her first book, how to be a good girl, was released with grieveland at the end of 2020. She writes, bartends, & dog moms in brooklyn.

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The well-documented collective loneliness of 2020 ended, for me, with a cherry on top: I met my long-distance lover on Zoom. I can’t and won’t tell you why but I will tell you we’ve still never touched. Mostly, our intimacy was punctuated by the switch from group video calls to one-on-one audio. While the phone is a real erotic constraint, calls in an age of digital media also feel like a bit much, a bit extra, a bit combative. Phone sex is not an impasse but like, I don’t know, an equipoise of power.

Gay sex has always been down the alley, under the table, off the hook. Exorbitant, you know? A frantic deep-dive into someone else’s moon. A kind of half-ass preciousness. A precise sort of ass. A theoretical recklessness. But the chaotic vulnerability of the phone (foggy, winding, some weird rubber sound in my headphones) occasionally makes me feel a little bit straight. I know I sound absurd, absurdist even—muting myself when I pee, chewing my microwaved dinner softly, running for the doorbell—but what I’m saying is that when I began to suspect the phone was all we would have, it was all I wanted: that severe trust that someone else is listening, that disembodied voice, that mid-conversation call drop. It charged me up. Because the love is really here and it’s reckless, babe.

Tiana Reid is a writer and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.