I often tell my friends I will settle on a mental relationship with Ryan Gosling for the rest of my life. Because to be honest, sometimes the agony of interpreting a guy’s flirtatious texts is almost too excruciating to bear.

The norm for our generation of women is no longer to await flowers. It has become a game of decoding texts, Facebook messages and deciding whether that one-word answer is “just because he’s busy,” or he doesn’t want to continue the conversation.

With so many modes of communication and so many messages to decode and understand, being single has become even more of a headache.

But we ultimately hold a very good sense of humor about it all. We joke about our mental relationships with overwhelmingly attractive celebrities and the cats we say we are going to grow old with.

We know we will be fine in the end. But to keep our sanity, we have to find humor in the rather ridiculous questions we ask ourselves.

For example, which emoji does a girl respond with when a guy says something sweet: the blushing smiley, or are words more appropriate?

The digitalization of relationships has changed the way we perceive our lingo as well.

Who knew there were differences between “Hi,” “Hey” and “Heyy” in texts? The “Hi” infers an I’ll-only-talk-to-you-if-I-have-to type of attitude, while the “Hey” is bit more chipper, but is strictly friendly. And of course the “Heyy” translates to, “I want you.”

In addition to redefining our greetings, we have coined terms to define our slightly neurotic actions.

“To stalk” was formerly used to refer to obsessive, restraining-order worthy behavior. Now it describes the actions of girls who spend hours searching for their crushes on social media platforms to get a basic reading of who they are.

But then again, these searches can cause doubt. If a guy “Likes” Nickelback on Facebook, does a girl immediately write him off as not worth her time?

So many questions are brought on by 21st-century single-girl-to-guy interactions ― and very few answers.

Yet girls continue to obsess and panic about a guy’s words. Despite the number of times we throw our phones across the room in confusion concerning a guy’s texts, we are ultimately hopeless romantics.

The thought of “what if” is ever present. Therefore, the responses are sent and the endless wait begins for a reply back. Of course, with the reply comes an endless amount of over analyzing.

But girls bond over their digital romances. We laugh that a guy is a keeper if he uses the proper form of your versus you’re in a text. We come together to wait out the time it takes for him to text back.

But the fact that we still go out and look for love despite the ups and downs that technology has given us is pretty remarkable.

We just need to maintain our sense of humor about singledom, no matter how ridiculous the questions we ask ourselves may be: “So if he says, ‘Hey what’s up?’ Do I reply with the truth: that I am downing a pizza, or just, ‘Not much, you?’”

So for the girls currently staring at their phones wondering what that text and emoji combination means, have no fear.

The single-girl universe has your back. And Ryan Gosling will always be your mental boyfriend.

Anna Hodge is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at ahodge@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @annabhodge.

Published on April 4, 2013 at 2:28 am