‘I got tired of so many gifs’: How digital communication can impact age-gap relationships

“I got tired of so many gifs and gave up our communication for lost,” says Eugenio R., a 42-year-old graphic designer who met a 31-year-old man on Instagram. Though their dates were going well, problems came into play when they started to communicate digitally. “When we started to talk on WhatsApp, he only sent gifs that I then had to decode. At first, I thought it was funny, but after a while, the connection faded and I lost interest,” he recalls.

It’s not just emojis, gifs and stickers that can reveal their sender’s age — it’s also the way they choose to connect. Each generation approaches channels of communication differently, one of the findings of the study Generation Mute: Millennials Phone Call Statistics, which concluded that 75% of those surveyed born between 1981 and 1996 see receiving a phone call as an interruption of daily life that takes up too much time. Meanwhile, Boomers value phone calls and 61% of members of Gen Z, according to an Uswitch poll, prefer written WhatsApp messages over phone calls.

These differences wouldn’t be terribly noteworthy if it weren’t for the existence of age-gap relationships which, according to statistics from the dating app Bumble, are becoming more and more common. A total of 63% of the app’s users don’t consider age to be a determining factor when it comes to who they go out with: 35% of women say they have become less critical of relationships with age differences, and a little over half of the men surveyed say they’d be open to date someone up to seven years older. It’s all good — until it’s time to communicate.

Don’t call me

Millennials prefer using asynchronous applications (those that do not require immediate interaction, as would a telephone conversation), because they consider it to be a more comfortable, less intrusive form of communication. “Although they’re not a generation that was born carrying around a tablet, they are oriented towards productivity and as a result, have learned to manage their time well. Asynchronous communication helps them to organize the messages that they need to respond to, and on what timeline,” Entic Soler, couple’s psychologist and associate professor at the Department of Psychology and Education Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, tells EL PAÍS. “That way, they can answer more calmly and think over their response, something that can also happen with audio messages. This generates a lack of confidence in one’s communication skills. In traditional forms of communication, like that of the telephone, you say what you say the first time, and is accepted as right from the very beginning.”

Soler thinks that communication problems that can arise between members of different may be addressed with, yes, even more communication. “When the members of a couple have different relationships with digital communication systems, it’s important to come to an agreement,” says Soler. “There’s a precept of communication that says that it’s impossible to not communicate, given that even silence communicates something. The person on the receiving end of that silence may have a certain perception of it. According to how we use systems to communicate, we can run into misunderstandings, as with one partner who writes in paragraphs and another who responds with a single gif. We have to be open about these differences and come up with best practices for communicating, in addition to coming to an agreement on what communication channels will be used.”

Miguel Ángel del Corral Domínguez, an expert in linguistics and communication, says that the content of conversations can also play a role, given that when it comes to large generational gaps, members of a relationship may not share the same experiential and cultural references.

“Linguistic differences are often not overly profound, unless we’re talking about an extreme difference between partners’ ages. Today thirty-somethings, at least when they’re among family members and their romantic partners, use a lot of colloquialisms and youthful, if not adolescent, slang,” he says. In fact, the rise of social media hasn’t led to the creation of a secret language among young people, but rather, its widespread popularization. When a teen video or phrase goes viral, it can reach individuals who are double or triple the age of its creator.

‘Squid Game’ with no subtitles

The series Only Murders in the Building humorously reflects the immense differences that can arise when it comes to communication between different generations. “It’s like I’m watching Squid Game without subtitles,” says Steven Martin’s character after listening to Selena Gómez and Zoe Colletti’s characters talk.

“It’s really interesting to look at how different people [of different ages and eras] are using language on the internet,” Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, tells Vox. “There’s a misperception that if people are using language differently, then someone must be right, but that’s not true. There’s not one right way of using language online. We can use language differently, and it can actually help us better understand each other.”

She continues: “You can write the way you want to talk, but we need to have some communication about the means in which you are expressing it to avoid communication difficulties and misinterpretations.”

“My boyfriend calls me every day, but I never know what to say. Do I tell him that I went to the office, that I had a couple of horrible meetings, and that now I’m going to the supermarket? I don’t understand this mania of talking for talking’s sake,” says Clara R., 37-year-old brand manager whose partner is 49. “The few times that I’m the one to call him, it’s for something relatively important, or at least, entertaining, and I ask him first through WhatsApp if it’s OK to call him, because I hate answering the telephone when I’m having a drink with my friends, when I’m in the middle of dinner or on the couch watching Netflix and I have to pause a series to listen to some story from his day that doesn’t affect me in the slightest. And I’ll be frank, I can’t think of many things that are worse than a video call without prior warning.”

“All the inconveniences of a phone call are aggravated by video calls, which require them to show up live, no filters, looking at themselves with all their defects zoomed in on and in full view of the other participants,” says Ferran Lalueza Bosch, a professor of information sciences and communication. “Anxiety follows a mathematical pattern: the higher the perceived threat of time loss and the lower the perception of our own resources to cope with it, the higher the anticipatory anxiety of the situation.”

“With regard to the use of emoticons and stickers, it’s similar to content itself: it all depends on our degree of trust and familiarity with our interlocutor,” explains Corral Domínguez. “In the case of a couple, that is presumably high. However, care must be exercised if the interlocutor lacks knowledge of our code, which is frequent among older people. And this is not limited to visuals: consider the use of irony and sarcasm.”

“There is an obvious generational gap and you try to keep up to date so as not to be behind the times or miss what is happening,” sums up Eugenio R. “In the end, it becomes a game that can be a bit confusing, because you interpret the sticker one way and the person who sent it to you meant it in another.” He mentions that, although he eventually stopped seeing the 31-year-old he met through social media, the young man still occasionally sends more GIFs. What does it all mean? The question, much like language itself, can elicit countless interpretations.

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