Well, yeah. Because WE DON’T FIND IT TO BE RUDE. Duh.
Yeah - most of mine aren’t, either. But the girl in the OP was IIRC in her early 20’s - which is the prime time for many of your friends being just as I described.
I’m capable of feeling special to that other person too, but if they text throughout the date, the bar for meeting that challenge will be raised.
The issue really isn’t even about not feeling special, though. When I’m out with someone who can’t put the phone down longer than a couple hours, I get the worrisome impression that our values, backgrounds, and expectations are too uncomfortably different. I’m also going to be concerned that it’s not 15 minutes into our date yet, and he’s already doing something that I’m either going to have to ask him to quit or bite my tongue about. That shouldn’t be happening until, like, date 4 or 5, at the earliest.
I assure you there is no way I would ever be jealous of pathetic souls whose every waking moment is dictated by someone on the other end of a handheld. I have nothing but pity for them, but neither do I really want to be around them. I do understand your need to rationalize, though.
How does anything that I have written indicate that that is like me? I get the occasional emergency request for assistance. Why so bitter? Seriously.
Having re-read the OP, I’m going to revise my statement slightly. I don’t spend time with anyone where I feel the need to be texting on a regular basis while I’m with them, and I think it would start to bother me if someone were to be interrupting our conversation repeatedly to text. What I guess I have done, specifically with people whom I know would not be bothered by me having my phone on me, is to glance at my phone during natural lulls in the conversation (particularly when I’m done looking at my menu but the other person isn’t, or if we’re settling down to a movie and I’m about to turn my phone off when I notice I have a text). I have also been known to ask the other person if she minds if I send a quick response to something. I don’t typically (or ever, to my knowledge) immediately grab for my phone the second I get texted if I’m in the middle of a conversation. The phone is not my highest priority; it’s just something I’m OK dealing with if I have time and my companion doesn’t mind.
I’ll also add the caveat that I’ve been on perhaps six first-dates in my life, and only two were in an era where I was carrying a cell phone (and one was a date that I didn’t even know was a date until several days later). So I make no proclamations about being a dating expert. I can only say what is OK with me.
Uhhhno. You’re on the date with a new guy/girl. Not with the sad friend or dress girl. If you’re friends would stop talking to you because you didn’t answer their OMG!!! text, then you’re friends are stupid drama queens.
How can you not possibly see that answering them would be rude to your companion?
And I would add that, IMO, the appropriate setting for your phone is OFF if you have committed to spend time with someone in person.
Well, you can ask Asimovian if I do it.
Which reminds me. I’ve been to a few funeral services in the past few years. I found it surprising that no official announcement was made to mute or turn off your cell phone. While I dont expect people to actually use them during the service (but who knows!) I can certainly see where, in a large crowd, someone would just plain forget!
I wonder how many solemn services have been interupted by cell phone rings (and I bet there could be some really inappropriate ones at that)?
takes a deep breath
Okay, you know, you all may be right. I’ve been with the same guy for over a decade, since before I had a cellphone. And as I said before, I’ve had basically zero “first dates” with people I wasn’t already friends with and/or sleeping with.
It is entirely possible that, since I’m used to spending romantic-time with people with whom I already have a fairly substantial (if not biblical) mutual knowlege, I don’t have a proper grasp of first-date dynamics with someone who is basically a stranger.
Anyone who I’d be out on a date with would already know that my phone is NEVER off and rarely on Vibrate (movies, funerals, weddings, etc.), and that I will be responding to texts/reading emails as they come in, fit among breaks in the conversation. Not because I have to for work, or anything like that, but because I am pretty obsessive about always being reachable at all times by all methods by anyone who might need/want to do so.
Anyway, yeah. I’m done here.
When someone responds with inexplicable hostility and invective, it most often says far more about them than it does about you.
Stranger
To me, it’s perfectly okay to be “cut out” of an interaction for a few seconds. It doesn’t even register. I mean, I’m pretty talky, but lulls in conversation happen. Attention and focus drift. I’m comfortable with that.
Whereas I don’t even currently know how to answer my phone and am a technology laughingstock! If I get a call while on a date with Asi, I just hand him the phone and make panicky gestures. 
In all honesty, if I didn’t have repeated 1st hand experience with this phenomenon, I probably wouldn’t understand what the fuss is about. But it really is a pain sitting across from someone who is so wrapped up in their electronic world that they can’t look you in the eyes for longer than a few seconds.
I have no problems with someone looking down to see if they’ve gotten a message or firing off a few texts while I go to the coat room. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people who use their phone to carry on unnecessary conversations throughout a date.
Go to DC if you want to see some examples in nature. A lot of men there seem to think the cool thing to do is go to a bar or club and just stand around texting. Call me a fogey, but isn’t the whole point of going out to socialize with the people around you? The whole phenomenon makes me think common sense is on the decline.
Boy, statements like these impress me - my opinion personally, nothing else - as so very sad. That people are so needy of distraction, and unwilling or incapable of paying undivided attention to any one thing/person. I fear that so many folk who pride themselves on “multitasking” fail to realize that they aren’t doing any one of their particular tasks especially well, but handle them all in a superficial and distracted manner.
I guess it is good that you have found folk who are not troubled by this, but I sure can’t see how it is a “good thing” in any way.
I’m not sure what folk I’m supposed to have found who aren’t troubled by what. What is it that you think I’m guilty of doing?
I think you and I are generally in agreement about this. We may not be exactly on the same page about where the cutoff is, but I don’t think we’re that far apart.
I have a dream – a dream that, one day, people who have different values will be able to see others’ differences as just that – differences, and not consider them sad and pathetic even if those differences aren’t being inflicted on them.
It’s only a dream, though.
Well, sure. We went to a ballgame last week and two young women came to their seats an hour late and sat down and immediately started texting. I thought it was funny, but it does seem kind of silly.
As I said initially, no one likes to be ignored. We’d likely all agree on that. (Only on the dope would I feel the need to make that so tentative.)
I’m comfortable with lulls too. That’s why I don’t automatically reach for my phone during those times, I just coast along until the silence naturally ends. Eventually one of us will think of something new to say or ask. We’re mutually working on that together. This is why we’re on a date.
But if one person decides to send tweet messages during the lull, that just leaves the other person sitting there twirling their pasta. Now I understand that you wouldn’t be bothered by that, if this were you. But wouldn’t it irk you just a little bit that your date assumes “okay, we aren’t talking now, so let me talk to socialize with someone else now”? Not even a little bit?
Maybe my experiences have left me jaded.