Word Clouds

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called “How Text Messages Change From Dating to Marriage”, where I compared my text messages with my husband before and after we got married. Several people suggested that I write a follow up post after we had kids. Well, we had our first baby.

We can’t believe it, but Henry turns one this weekend. This past year has been an eventful one, filled with many ups and downs, moments of overwhelming joy and sleepless nights that never end. But two things are certain: (1) our lives have been forever changed and (2) we’ve generated a ton of data to analyze, including our text messages. Here’s how our texts have changed from dating to marriage to parenthood.

My husband won the award for consistency, with his messages evolving from “home soon” to “home now” to “coming home”. For me though, my most frequent word became “just”. At first, I was surprised to see this, but then it all made sense when I looked at a few of my text messages.

Many people predicted that I would see words like “poop” or “milk” pop into my vocabulary, but those actually only appeared in about a dozen text messages. I realized that the biggest change for me and my husband after we became parents was that we started communicating more.

While I was on maternity leave and my husband had returned to work, the thing that we missed most was spending time together as a family. We used text messages to keep everyone connected and on the same page. I constantly gave my husband updates during the day about cute things that our son was doing for the first time. My husband would text me to let me know that he was leaving the office and excited to be coming home. Both of us now text each other 4 times as much as we did when we first started dating.

Not only are we communicating more over text, we’ve also been collecting and sharing a ton of data about the baby. Those of you with kids know that it’s often helpful to note the time of a baby’s last feeding / nap / diaper change to get an idea of why they’re uncomfortable and what they need next. We tracked that data for our son’s first six months.

The visualization below shows our son’s feeding times during my last month on maternity leave, when his schedule started getting a bit more consistent. During that time, he was eating 6-9 times per day, totaling 1.5 hours each day. I was never away from him for more than a few hours. On weekends, my husband would take the night shift, and then jump back into the work week on Mondays.

Parenthood is hard work. The hours are grueling, and I’m constantly trying to figure out how to best split my waking hours caring for my family, doing a good job at work, and squeezing in some time for friends, my husband and myself.

Now that I’m a parent, I have an incredible appreciation for all the parents before me. I also have a renewed appreciation for my husband, who’s going through the exact same struggles, while being so supportive through it all. So why doesn’t that show in our text messages? Taking a second look, I found that 1 in 12 of our texts is actually an image. Here are some examples:

It turns out a lot of the more interesting exchanges were done through photos, screenshots, bitmojis and gifs. When you’re short on time, why not send a thousand words with just a few clicks? After texting “coming home”, with one additional picture, you can say that you’re excited to do so, and let’s also have a dance party after having breakfast for dinner.

While my husband and I were dating, we used text messages to flirt. Once we got married, we spent a lot of time together and text messages were mainly used to coordinate logistics. As parents, we now use text messages to keep each other up to date, but also to brighten each others’ days and support each other in this phase of life where we’re limited on time, but have more love than ever before.

To my husband: Happy nine years since our first text message. Hope you enjoyed your second installment of #thegiftofdata.

To my little one: Happy first birthday. Your dad and I can’t wait to continue celebrating all of your firsts and showering you with love.

Way back in October 2008, my now husband and I went on our first date. On our one year anniversary, his gift to me was a Word doc of all of our text messages since our first date (what he likes to refer to as #thegiftofdata). This was especially high tech back in the day (given that we both had feature phones) and what I considered to be the most thoughtful gift ever (given that we are both nerds).

To celebrate our six year anniversary, I decided to take his present to the next level. I took a look at all of our text messages from our first year of dating and compared them with our text messages from the past year as an engaged couple and then newlyweds. I started by looking at the words we used in our text messages six years ago versus present day.

First of all, we can clearly see that my husband has an obsession with the word “home”. As for me, my early twenties self frequently started conversations with the term “hey”, and more recently I seem to have decided to no longer greet my husband, but instead agree with most of the things he texts me.

I then looked at the frequency of specific terms we used in our text messages when we started dating compared to the past year.

Our conversations changed from “hey, what’s up?” to “ok, sounds good”. We stopped saying each other’s names in our text messages. We don’t say in “love” as much anymore. Several words stayed relatively consistent over the years though, such as “home” and “dinner”. I took a look at the actual text messages that contained these words, and found that although the terms stayed the same, the context they were used in actually changed over time.

The main difference is that while we were dating, we didn’t see each other every day, so a lot of our communication had to happen via text. We’d often message the other person to see what they were doing or tell them that we were thinking of them. As a married couple, since we’re together all the time, we set up date nights and say sweet things to each other in person, so texting is mostly used to confirm logistics or share random thoughts.

Since the content of our text messages changed so much, I decided to look and see if the time of day we’d send text messages to each other changed as well. I focused on the messages we sent each other during the month after our first date, our engagement and our wedding.

While we were dating, we started thinking about each other around 3pm in the afternoon and we’d send each other text messages until 3am in the morning. As a married couple, our texting schedule has pretty much flipped. We text all through the workday and never at night.

We see the same story here. As a new couple, since we were apart the majority of the time, we had to check in with the other person every now and then, especially during the evening and late at night when we had no idea who they were with! It was also to tell the other person that we were out late doing something cool without them… and wishing they were there, of course.

As a committed couple, the only time of the day that we aren’t together is during the workday, so that’s when we text. We know exactly where the other person is each evening and if we’re doing something cool, it’s likely that we’re in it together and telling each other about it face to face.

Overall, our text messages started out very flirty and personal. Since we were new in our relationship, we made sure the things we said were interesting and thoughtful. As our relationship progressed, we spent more time together and got more comfortable with each other. Our text messages became more predictable, but only because all of the unpredictable things were said in person. We no longer have to text “I love you” from a distance in the middle of the night. I can now roll over, snuggle with my husband and whisper it into his ear.

To my husband: happy anniversary and I hope you enjoy your 2014 version of #thegiftofdata.

How Text Messages Change After Having A Baby

How Text Messages Change from Dating to Marriage

Alice Zhao

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