Getting to know your parents or having a “rough start” on social media are no longer the hallmarks of a serious relationship.
In the digital age, a relationship is not official until you have the number saved in your phone.
Until then, many singles keep the anonymous phone number for their crush in a flood of text messages from friends, family and the like.
“Once you put in a name and a number and it’s stored in your phone and everything, it’s basically permanent,” Shai Martin, a 34-year-old electrician from Queens, told the Wall Street Journal about the phenomenon.
His fiancée, 38-year-old content creator Kisha Peart, used to save her dates using only her first name, but when she started seeing multiple Matts after a failed date with one of them, things got a little more complicated.
Eventually she settled for referring to men by their area code.
“Because once you save their number, they ignore you,” she told the Journal.
Tisia Saffold, a relationship and personal coach based in Virginia, follows her own 60-day rule. In other words, don’t save a guy’s number in your phone for two months.
“It prevents women from developing such a strong emotional bond with someone who doesn’t deserve their place,” the 35-year-old told the Journal.
She recalled a recent third date with a man whose ego was bruised when she accidentally discovered that he was just a number in her phone, with no assigned contact—and not even a name to distinguish his digits from those in appointment reminders and spam.
“He said, ‘Wow, I thought we had this behind us,'” she said.
Unlike Saffold, he had already made her contact list official.
Georgia-based dating coach Benny Lichtenwalner explained that men are more likely to realize earlier in a relationship whether they are seriously interested in a person and remember their loved one’s number much sooner.
However, men will remain in digital dating purgatory for much longer and will have to earn the coveted contact card in a woman’s phone.
Sometimes they are given just a temporary nickname – like “fireman” or “finance man” – before being saved under their real name.
Women would have to “like him so that his real name appears there,” Lichtenwalner said.
Sometimes, however, devices play tricks on us and suggest names before we even have a chance to decide whether we want to add them as a contact. With Apple’s technology, users may be prompted to save their Hinge match’s number as a contact title with the suggestion “Maybe: John.”
“Nothing makes me angrier than when Apple tries to make decisions for me,” Dani Cohen, 25, founder of an influencer management company in California, told the Journal. “It’s like Steve Jobs saying from the grave, ‘You’re going to save this guy’s number.'”
As a general rule of thumb, Generation Z members refuse to save a number in their phone before a third date.
“As silly and insignificant as it may seem, it feels like taking a step forward,” she said.
But not all young singles follow the same rules when it comes to dating. Alex Yetter, 23, a real estate agent from Oregon, started saving numbers if she liked the person after she made the unfortunate faux pas of confusing two men she was dating and calling the wrong one.
However, Yetter does not keep a record of her failed affairs in her contact book, but regularly deletes the guys with whom things didn’t work out.
