I don’t want to have a 60 second phone call and an email just to negotiate when we can get together for a long phone chat or where and when to meet at a restaurant. Texts with really well for that, and then, when i forget which restaurant we settled on, i can look at the texts and know.
Sure, for something important at work, that can be a great style. But it’s not how i want to run my personal life.
My biggest issue with texting is that I have an unfortunately high standard for what proper communication ought to be. I’m a network guy, so in my mind every single message sent needs an “ACK” otherwise I have to assume the message was not received.
This means I am constantly annoyed at people in my life who don’t reply for days. Some friends who reply a week later, others who never reply, and so on. I end up getting annoyed at people figuring they are intentionally ghosting me, when it’s just their own style.
At work this is not a problem, but with friends and family … what a pain.
My wife and I are on the same wavelength with this, thankfully.
Husband of 23 years here. i thought it was pretty clear that you were expected to buy the tickets, especially since she told you “Go ahead and get parking if you want.” 
Oops…forgot to actually address the OP…
IMHO, both had a part to play in this. It was absolutely crystal clear that you were to buy the tickets. But she replied with a chip on her shoulder and didn’t help things along.
That’s why texting sucks. Tone and nuance are gone.
If i think the sender needs to know i got it, and i don’t need to reply, i just give it a thumbs up.
So, a typical exchange with a friend:
I’m busy Mon and Fri, but could do TV another day
Unfortunately, I’m to busy 
There were two days between the first and second text, when the friend didn’t know how busy the week would be. No response defaults to “we won’t meet”, though.
I forget stuff a lot. I have conversations with my husband where I have to go back and ask him again. I imagine that’s annoying.
We have a Discord channel called #schedule. We have multiple channels, actually. Anything related to scheduling goes into that channel. That way I don’t have to ask him three times, I can just look it up.
In this case, with tickets, that would go in #finance as does anything purchase related. There would be no ambiguity. My husband is the master of tedious specificity.
This. If I did the research, had the site open with the seats, I would buy them. Not punt it over to my partner. Odd.
The “thumbs up” is the perfect network ACK to a text message. That’s all I ask. It says everything: received, possibly read, but might fall off the radar, but definitely not ghosting you.
To be honest, I would have been slightly confused given the context and asked for clarification. As said, she presumably has the screen open, so one would assume she is buying. I damned well know that people drop off periods at the ends of texts (I do), and it sounds like she likely wants me to buy them, but there is a disconnect between the situation and the request for me to buy them. I’d make sure so as not to accidentally double buy the tickets. Now, the explanatory bit about punctuation may have been unnecessary, I don’t know, but after what reads to me as a snippy “is this a trick question” instead of a simple “yes, please buy the tickets,” I can understand.
Yeah, CYA. I started to refuse starting any work until I had the requirements in writing. Amazing how many people think they said/wrote something when they didn’t.
Still looking for an answer to this, but i think the OP has ghosted us.
Huh?
Thumbs up means I read, understood, and agree. If anything was asked of me, I commit to doing all of it. A thumbs up is meaningless if the text it replies to contained a question or vaguery amounting to a question.
IMO. YMMV. And probably does.
I mostly use it for “got it”. But i agree that it has connotations that can be bad in some circumstances. Like, “i can’t watch TV today, i just heard that my mother died”. The thumbs up would be a little too perky.
But i don’t use it for questions, i answer questions.
I can absolutely understand the ambiguity, particularly as your wife was driving the purchase in the first place. Even if the language was a period after “go ahead and buy tickets”, I might have double-checked with my spouse to confirm I was understanding the ask/instructions.
I’m not going to make too many assumptions, as personal communication habits within relationships can be inscrutable to outsiders, but one way to read this all is:
… but again, I could read this a number of other ways too. She could be right. Maybe you were being willfully obtuse and have a habit of not following through on simple requests or responsibilities because you weren’t asked directly, and she’s sick of it. This is just one more interaction in a long list of times when she has asked/said “go do this” and you have said “oh, I didn’t know that by ‘go do this’ you meant you wanted me to go do this now.”
Or, maybe something else stressful is going on that has her on edge?
Yeah…I think I would be leery of giving my usual thumbs-up for “Hey, we’re coming in to JFK on Tuesday at 6am, can you pick us up and give us a ride to Philly? Remember there’s 5 of us, and we have a few things, so…”
The devil’s horns emoji is more appropriate for acknowledging a text like that. 
Yeah. I know this is divorced from context but it just seems like a really shitty way to respond to a misunderstanding. Unless it’s meant in a teasing way, but I’m guessing it wasn’t.
I’m guessing people who have trouble getting along are facing an extra barrier with text messages. There’s so much that can be interpreted the wrong way, and if you’re already in an argumentative relationship, ooh boy.
Sorry, just busy over the weekend.
Went to the game, everything was fine with wife of 23 years. She was actually amused I posted on here and found most people agreeing with her that the text meant “you go ahead and get the tickets”.
I usually buy the tickets (we have a shared bank account) and the parking is bought seperately. I got the parking since she is not good with maps and the various parking garages on the app she would have no idea where they are in relation to the arena. Since we knew we were going the parking was a go, we were just waiting to see if the kid was joining us.
But yes, I thought since she obviously had the Seatgeek app open to see prices she was ready to buy. She has her own account on there to get tickets to events I’m not attending.
It seemed pretty clear that she was telling you to go ahead and buy the tickets.
You left out the best part! So who actually ended up buying the darned tickets?! 