It’s a girl texting a boy and they’re both colored in orange hues. You get it, you’ve seen it. The meme doesn’t have a better, more interesting, more descriptive name. The meme existed with some popularity before the pandemic but once we were sent to our homes and communication became mostly digital we really took it. It became especially strong because all of our dating lives became digital. Any frustrations we had with the digital dating scene or digital communication at all were best expressed through that meme.
What is great about the meme is that it's not always from the boys perspective or girls perspective, you can play with the formatting of who is sending the message and who is responding to it. You can add panels and make their communication longer. It’s also very easy to make it two girls or two boys that look nearly identical talk to each other. As time has gone on, we’ve also gotten more variance in the ways the people look in the meme so if two straight people or two identical looking gay people don’t accurately represent your relationship, there’s more options to choose from.
The meme doesn’t have a distinct voice so there’s no way to predict if you are going to waste your time reading something wholesome or stupid. It should come as no surprise that I like when things are a little mean and have some bite to them. I prefer funny over positive and cruel over wholesome. I don’t like memes about how much you love your girlfriend or how nervous you are to talk to girls. Like all things about dating it can be annoying and uninteresting to read other peoples thoughts about it. I think the beauty of this meme is that when one really resonates with you, it can be really funny but there’s no way to know that before you inspect the individual meme. The format doesn’t immediately rule it out because it has become so many different things.
It’s good to have a go-to texting meme that can be endlessly repurposed, beyond the pandemic. Gone are the days of doctored imessage screenshots being our only way to represent communication online. It’s better to live in this world of these imaginary people and a brief summary of their trials and tribulations than entertain tinder and grindr screenshots. I would much rather read about the feelings and a summary of what online dating feels like than the literal evidence. The first one requires thought and effort and understanding of your role in the communication. The later requires me to drum up faux outrage that someone would lack decorum on an app designed to make it easier to have sex with strangers. I simply can’t be bothered.
It’s not a perfect meme or a particularly good one but it is necessary. It serves a purpose above all else. I do not want to write it off as bad or stupid but I think that’s where most of its content falls. It has potential. Some, but not most, of the ones that exist already are pretty good. We can do better. There will always be a low bar for entry when it comes to dating memes and I’m not going to write it off because oftentimes it is the best we’ve got. There’s something to be said for function over form.