Message Received

I woke up last Saturday morning with 467 unread messages in my "Just the Boys" WhatsApp group chat.

"@AdamLee are you alive?" was one of those messages that popped up repeatedly as I scrolled through the list that Saturday morning.

Due to time difference, the boys are one and a half hours later than I am.

"Sorry... sleeping. Phone on vibration," I wrote, eager to report that rigor mortis hadn't set in, and that I hadn't died alone overseas in my sleep without anyone noticing. 

"No wonder you didn't wanna take it out of your ass to look at the phone." Stanley my sex bunny friend wrote.

"It's 10:30am here... I haven't even had coffee... please... " I tapped as I walked out sleepily into my balcony.

One of the first things I do in the morning is to walk to the balcony - a habit I formed back home in Singapore.

I'd look out of my apartment, breathe in and feel thankful to be alive.

"Are you dead again @AdamLee?" Stanley typed, demanding I responded to both him and Carl.

I made coffee (black) and sat at the balcony, ready to catch up on life.

Indeed, I had a lot of catching up to do - 467 messages.

The drama - and theme - of the morning messages were messages.

Stanley had recently been seeing a guy.

Peter's kinda cute, according to Stanley.

He's 1.74m tall - just nicely and slightly taller than Stanley.

He's fair, has nice, large eyes, and a head full of puffy-wavy hair which could about describe any typical Korean star except that Peter really does look like one, so says Stanley.

The downside, says Stanley, is that he's a little on the heavy side. Literally heavy sides - Peter the Korean pop star has rich muffin tops.

"But beauty is only skin deep," Stanley would say.

"Speaking of skin," I began typing, "doesn't this Peter guy have some sort of hygiene problem down there?"

"@AdamLee, I forbid you to talk about my handsome K-Peter like that," Stanley typed, adding a gif of a plump Indian woman in a black sari with her palms by the sides of her temples wailing and shaking her head.

"Let's start off on a clean slate," Stanley suggested.

"I certainly look forward to that," I replied, smiling to myself as I took another sip of my black coffee.

The issue here is no longer about Peter's hygiene problem.

Stanley says the two of them get along really well - and that he's really beginning to like this Peter.

They first met when Stanley responded to Peter on Grindr and after a tryst, Stanley broke his first rule: He started dating his ONS.

The first date post-tryst was actually good.

The two met on late-Sunday morning, when Stanley accompanied Peter to the kid's section of Isetan to get Peter's 4-year-old niece a birthday present.

Then they did some adult shopping of their own, although with Stanley, that can also be interpreted in ways beyond a child's imagination.

The two then settled down at a Japanese restaurant where they quietly slurped ramen, and when Peter would cheekily wink at Stanley from across the table.

"That's good isn't it?" I typed.

"Yah, where's the ramen place?" Carl the dense one interjected.

Ignoring Carl, Stanley continued: "But here's where it starts going down."

"What's going down?" Carl asked sincerely, no doubt overwhelmed by both the volley of information and the burden of having to process multiple types of information.

"Who's going down," I asked, making sure Stanley wasn't about to take us on a ride - his type of ride.

"He stopped messaging," Stanley said.

Which explains why, when Peter stopped messaging Stanley, Stanley started messaging the group.

Stanley wanted comfort. Stanley wanted support. Stanley wanted answers.

Most of all, Stanley wanted made up answers.

"You guys think it's because he's busy?" he wrote in the group chat hopefully.

"'Cos I messaged him on a Sunday night at around 11.45pm. And he didn't reply. I mean, he could have been asleep. Then the next day, well, it's Monday.... who loves Mondays? So he must have been busy starting his day and week right?" Stanley wrote.

"And then I sort of paced myself and stopped messaging him good morning and how's your day by Thursday, because he DID NOT MESSAGE BACK FOR FIVE DAYS!" Stanley the insecure school girl told us.

"And it's all blue ticks, and he's online, and he doesn't reply me," Stanley said, the fonts of his WhatsApp message looking like they were wailing.

Carl aptly copied and pasted the gif of the plump Indian woman in black sari, wailing and shaking her head pitifully. 

If we had been younger, I would have told Stanley all that he wanted to hear.

He's busy lah, don't be silly.
He's an exec right? Maybe he's out of town?
He'll write back lah, you're such a good catch.

But we're forty this year and this sort of puppy love has to be crushed.

We have to stop having hopes and start moving on.

"Stan," I wrote and paused - enough to preempt my broken-hearted friend that I'm about to say something hurtful but probably accurate.

Stanley reacted by copying and pasting the gif of the plump Indian woman.

Carl responded by posting a series of applauding hand icons.

"He's not interested," I said. "Move on".

Six more of the plump Indian woman wailing appeared in succession.

As we left a very hurt Stanley to recover from my wake-up message, I went on later to reflect on the message of messages.

It's very annoying to wait for a reply on WhatsApp.

Although technology has allowed us to communicate with people who're miles away, what we cannot force is the other party's reply and attention.

It's worse when your messages are blue-ticked.

No, what's worse is, when the other party you're talking to has disabled that blue-tick function, disallowing you to know if he's read it or not.

But why the need for an immediate reply?

If we're in such hurry to get an immediate response, shouldn't we be calling the other party after we send them annoyingly positive messages pasted against backdrops of flowers, rainbows, sunrises?

"Hi, hi! Sorry to call - I just want to check if you got all my 72 good morning messages which I have been forwarding you. I mean, cos, you didn't say good morning back."

But in this day and age, especially when we use a lot of technology to communicate, we have to go with the flow and learn the subtext of texts, or meanings of no-replies.

Especially at our age, when we're no longer sweet young things who could afford to waste our youths thinking about why that crush of ours hadn't replied.

If we do that at our age, we're bordering pathetic.

It's one thing to find out why that person isn't replying us.

It's another to realise that, the lag time in between replies is bothering us so much it's making us look like crazy ex-girlfriends.

What's more, in Stanley's case, the act of not replying him immediately is already very clear to outsiders like us.

If you've gone on a first date and you like that person, regardless of how busy you are, you would at least have the courtesy of replying.

"TTYL" wasn't invented for nothing, you know.

At our age, sad as it is, we're fighting against time.

We have to move on the double.

No reply, ok, next. Some reply, ok, let's hold on to him and see if things get better. Frequent replies, ok good - we're on the right track.

But we have to keep moving as we do this.

Time is ticking, I told Stanley privately later that day.

"And you have to move on," I typed to him channelling the severity of my tone.

"I have," he said, managing to channel defeat in his font.

"I've moved on - I've stopped refreshing my WhatsApp to see what time Peter's last online and no, he still hasn't replied, but no, I've stopped wanting him to reply," Stanley went on.

"I'm now stalking him on Facebook, Instagram to see what exactly he's so busy with that he cannot even reply me," Stanley said.

I responded by copying and pasting the gif of the wailing plump Indian woman.



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Adam's stories are based on real life events and inspired by real people