When Ignoring a Text Is the Polite Thing to Do
Social norms need to keep up with how we communicate today
It used to be a commonly held belief that every request deserved a response. Not replying to someone who had sent you an invitation, made a request, or asked a question would be seen as a breach of the social contract. Indeed, it’s the entire basis of the RSVP, which literally comes from the French phrase “répondez s’il vous plaît,” or “please respond.”
This may have worked well back in the days of the home phone and snail mail, but how many requests would the average person need to respond to in 1990 anyway? These days, however, it’s a barrage.
Requests for our time come from friends, family, acquaintances, and complete strangers. They come via messaging apps, on social media, email, or any number of online services. And that’s before you add the multitude of automated reminders of previous requests that sneak back to find you just as you’d stopped feeling guilty about ignoring the first notification (looking at you, Facebook Events).
Let’s be honest — you really didn’t care about what the excuse was, anyway.
We don’t communicate the same way we used to, so why should the old rules of etiquette apply? In the era of…
