Love Sick: Emoticons

One day while hanging out on a keyboard, the colon symbol and the end parenthesis symbol met up. They got to talking and realized they had a lot in common and before you could say QWERTY, they fell in love. This love connection resulted in the smiley face emoticon.

The smiley face emoticon, or the SFE, is notorious for causing confusion amongst texters and web chatters across the globe. Many people upon receiving a 🙂 are forced to ask themselves the question: “What does it mean?”

This is especially true when the 🙂 comes from somebody you are crushing on.

Here’s my prescription for attempting to navigate the murky fields of technological lovin’.

1. In what context is the SFE being used? If the person is merely asking, “Hey, how’s your day going? :)” They might be just trying to be friendly and/or tend to be a person that overuses smiley faces in general. However, if the text is more along the lines of, “It was really nice seeing you earlier:)” there’s a good chance they are interested in you and want to get to know you better.
2. If you’ve known the person for awhile and they normally don’t send SFE’s, but all of a sudden like to express their emotions via punctuation marks, it is very likely that they are developing an interest in you and are trying to hint at it without being obvious.
3. If a person sends you a ;), the playful cousin of :), they more likely than not want to get in your pants and they’re hoping to woo you with this cheesy icon.

The best case scenario for dealing with the SFE is to not over think it too much. I’ve had friends, and I’ll admit I’ve done it myself too, who pore over what an SFE sent from a crush could possibly mean. If you like someone, just be up front and ask them if they like you back too. If they don’t, well you can stop wasting your time. But if they do, well that’s just 🙂

To learn more about SFE’s, check this out:

-The Love Doctor

Have questions for The Love Doctor? Submit tocarbontheblog@gmail.com!