Telephobia

The more I talk to people, the more I realize that my fear of telephones is not unique. It turns out there are a lot of normal, well-adjusted people who hate making and receiving phone calls. I've been somewhat relieved to learn this, because not only do I shoulder quite a few insecurities, but I also have insecurities about my insecurities and it's good to know that I might still appear to be a well-adjusted member of society in spite of it all.

I think that some level of discomfort with telephone conversations is actually a pretty common sentiment, but we telephobics tend to feel that there must be something wrong with us simply because telephones have become so ubiquitous and so visible in life. When I was in Provo a little over a month ago I found myself walking up the south campus ramp one evening, right about the time that everyone else was walking home. About halfway up the ramp I realized that an awful lot of the people walking past me were holding cell phones to their ear and so, amused, I began paying attention. I would say that well over two-thirds of the students I passed were talking on their cell phone (or perhaps listening to a message), and of the remaining one third all but two or three had their cell phones in hand, dialing a number or sending a text message or viewing a message they had received.

And sometimes, despite all my misgivings about this particular form of communication, I am one of these students. It's just a consequence of living, nowadays.

Although we're most aware of the words, communication involves a lot more that we tend to take for granted. Telephones remove all sorts of supporting layers, like eye contact and facial expressions and hand gestures and relative positioning and shared distractions, and unlike writing (which is a very comfortable form of communication for me), telephones don't compensate for the lack of physical context. With writing, I may lose face-to-face contact, but I can make up for it with extra time to think and with added control over my words and sentence structure and tone and punctuation and so on.

When I know someone well, I can usually fill in a lot of the missing context - that's why most conversations with my family are perfectly comfortable, and why my heart never jumps when I see their name pop up on my cell phone, and why I don't have to spend any time at all talking myself into dialing their number on a Sunday afternoon. With close friends the stress level increases just a little, and I don't call them very often but don't really feel any discomfort when I do. And perfect strangers are no problem at all because there aren't any personal relationships riding on the phone call - I can call the store to ask their hours, or the bike shop to find out how much a tune-up costs, or the bank to cancel my lost credit card, or computer support to find out what's wrong with my laptop. As a child I hated making these calls, but I've had lots of practice they no longer phase me.

The hard phone calls are the calls to people I know in real life, friends-but-not-best-friends or casual acquaintances. They don't know me well enough that they can forgive my awkwardness as uncharacteristic, and I don't know them well enough to tell if lapses in conversation or misunderstandings or any over-the-phone strangeness is a result of the medium of communication or if there are deeper social differences. I hate phone calls even more when I feel like there is a lot riding on it, like when a friendship (male or female, it doesn't matter) is just starting up and one or the other party is calling to say hi or to invite the other to do something. I'd really rather just talk to them in person and not risk the friendship on my inability to communicate what I want to communicate when I only have access to my voice.

I'm working on it, though. I no longer ignore phone calls just because I'm worried about awkward conversations, which means that nowadays if you call me and I don't answer you can almost always be sure that it's because I am not near my phone or because I am in class and forgot to turn off my ringer (oops) or because I am busy and will get back to you when I am free to chat. And I have gotten much better, when making potentially high pressure phone calls, at forcing myself to press SEND right after dialing the number, rather than staring at it for a minute or two, pressing END, waiting until I get my nerve up, and trying again.

But I will probably always be a little telephobic, and so be patient with me - and since you are likely just a little telephobic yourself, I promise to be patient with you as well.