A Couple Texts Only In Emojis For A Month, See What Happens

In an episode of New Tech City, a couple banishes written text from their communication and relies solely on emojis and photos for an entire month. What did the couple learn from the month-long experiment? It may surprise you, but the couple says the overall experience was positive.

To begin the challenge, Bustle reports the couple, Liza and Alex, downloaded as many emoji apps as they could. This would allow the couple to have as many emojis as possible for communication purposes. The next step was to pick an emoji to represent themselves. This was vital to the couple’s communication throughout the month.

New Tech City notes that the experiment was interesting in that it took the couple back to a primitive form of communication forcing them to create their own lexicon of imagery — oddly, not terribly unlike ancient Egyptians

Alex admits that he is not the most visual thinker which made it a little more difficult. However, Alex says his girlfriend is much more “effective with visuals.” Regardless of their initial differences in communication, both were excited to give the challenge a shot. They hoped, going into the project, that the emoji challenge would improve their communication skills with one another.

Cosmopolitan Magazine covered the story and spoke directly with Alex who said:

“I found myself willing to send a lot more what you might call cheesy, affectionate messages.”

Alex noted that sometimes certain affectionate phrases such as “I miss you” can lose its luster after a while, emojis helped fill in the gaps. Liza agreed with Alex’s assessment and went so far as to say the emojis made her feel special.

“It was so much better. It felt fuller than if you had sent something… someone telling you that you love them is a great and beautiful and wonderful thing, but getting those stickers, getting those emojis was a sort of different experience.”

Though many things were better when using emojis, more serious situations became confusing. For example, one day Liza tried to tell Alex not to come to drinks because a friend was dealing with a family death and Liza and her friends were having girls’ night, but Alex completely misunderstood and thought she was saying she was sad he couldn’t be there.

Despite the limits of emojis, at the end of the 30 days of their experiment Alex and Liza not only hadn’t ruined their relationship, but they’d felt like the emojis had actually given them a lot of insight into the way they communicate.

Interestingly, emojis have been used in the past publicaly to communicate with a significant other. Calvin Harris publicly dumped Rita Ora with an emoji.

What do you think of the emoji experiment? Could you text only in emoji for an entire month?