You just got a text message from your boyfriend. What is he trying to tell you?

If the historical arc of your dating life did not coincide with the advent of the text message, this might explain why you are still married — or got married in the first place.

Experts — if one can be an expert in a subject so banal that its most sophisticated declarative is “lol” — say that the humble text message and its inherent vagaries have added a layer of opacity to romantic relationships.

Oh for a simpler time, when male-female communication was generally in-person, and guys never said anything more enigmatic than “Are you going to eat your fat?”

Today, a cottage industry has grown up around deciphering/analyzing/preparing counteractive responses to vague male texts. At happy hour, women will crowd around a smartphone screen much like Egyptologists studying hieroglyphics on a stone jug. There, says The Washington Post, they (the women, not the Egyptologists) “are forced to interpret the emotions and motives of male partners who lack the emotional vocabulary to explain themselves.”

This phenomenon even has a name: Hermeneutic labor, a term apparently coined by Ellie Anderson, a California professor.

Hermeneutics refers to the interpretation of language, and Anderson says hermeneutic labor encompasses three phases of emotional work: interpreting the feelings of others; determining when and whether to bring difficult, emotional conversations up; interpreting your own feelings.

I scarcely need to waste the space it takes to say it, but, in terms of gender, this activity is an exclusively one-way street. For a guy to give serious thought to a girlfriend’s text message, he would first have to read it all the way to the end, something that only happens in movies.

The Post says, “Anderson argues that hermeneutic labor is largely performed by women who are forced to interpret the emotions and motives of male partners who lack the emotional vocabulary to explain themselves.”

This is probably so old-fashioned that I hesitate to bring it up, but if you don’t know what he means, couldn’t you just pick up the phone and ask? Or does this violate some unspoken 21st century socio-tech taboo, in which dating couples must refrain from actually speaking to each other?

This also raises an entirely valid question: Is he emotionally detached, or is he simply a poor writer? “I don’t know, Ethel, he’s passive aggressive, emotionally unavailable and demonstrates sociopathic tendencies, but at least he can write a full sentence, and that’s hard to find these days.”

Just 120 years ago, James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle, “You have me completely in your power. I know and feel that if I am to write anything fine and noble in the future I shall do so only by listening at the doors of your heart. I would like to go through life side by side with you, telling you more and more until we grew to be one being together until the hour should come for us to die.”

Today, women are lucky to get “k c ya.”

I totally see Anderson’s point, but who is to blame? His cold, cold heart? His high school English teachers? The Galaxy s24 Ultra? I also know guys who would be puzzled why women were assigning any meaning to their phone missives at all. It’s a text message, not “Pride and Prejudice.”

But psychologists say there’s more to it, that “boys often are socialized to suppress the expression of vulnerable and caring emotions,” the Post says. I haven’t met these socialized boys, but I am perfectly willing to entertain the notion that they exist.

And guys, seriously. Do you understand how low the bar has been set for us? And what this means?

Here, let me help.

If there’s a girl you’ve been wanting to date, just cut and paste this into a text: “I’m hurting right now because my father’s unreachable expectations have thrown me into a shame spiral.”

She’ll be over to your house in three seconds.

That is, if men and women are still allowed to talk in person.

It's the burning question that requires a forthright answer: Do we need a titanium phone?

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Is that text from your boyfriend a good thing or a bad thing?