It’s been said that the population is divided into two halves and neither is aware of the existence of the other. It’s to do with how people use toilet paper and apparently there are two distinct methods. I’ll not explain any further, but leave it to your imagination. The point is, how we use toilet paper is something people never discuss, which is probably a good thing. The result is that each half of the population imagines everyone else operates in the same way they do. It’s a bit like being a child and, until you learn otherwise, you imagine everyone’s family life is just like your own.
I recently discovered another social divide that I was completely unaware of but this one runs down a more obvious split in the population.
When I’m texting my muse I always add two kisses on the bottom. Sometimes I send just kisses on their own, and of course anyone with a loving relationship does this. Don’t they?
tools
However, I never send kisses to anyone else. Well I say that, sometimes I can get carried away in a message to a good friend and forget what I’m doing; as a result, some people have nearly got inappropriate kisses. Then, of course, there was the couple of texts to a former colleague whom I like to borrow tools from. But the problem there was that a text came in from my muse, I tapped the notification to open the message but instead of her message being at the top of the list, for some reason, the last one was from him, to which I replied without looking any further. He got a single message out of the blue with two kisses. A few hours later my muse sent another text and the same thing happened again.
He didn’t speak to me for about a year.
But I’ve recently discovered that, it seems, all women send kisses to each other when signing off texts. This came to light during a random moment when we got talking about how many kisses we usually send to each other. I send two, always lower case, she sends three. At that that point she started going through her phone talking about how many kisses her friends sign off with. Some send two, three, or one. She has a friend who is particularly lavish so that her kisses often wrap over to the next line. But hey.
service
She went on to explain that she has levels of kisses, such as those she wouldn’t send kisses to, usually work colleagues or the guy at the garage when she puts her car in for a service. My mate with all the good tools could tell you how that would go. With female friends she might not send kisses to those she’s not so close to, so there’s a hierarchy, perhaps some get more kisses than others.
However, I never get kisses from my male friends. Which, I suppose, is no surprise. Let’s not get into the debate about toxic masculinity. But until this morning I had no idea that women have this social convention. I suppose guys have other social conventions such as swearing and farting in front of each other, but we don’t send kisses no matter how much we appreciate each other’s knowledge of the Premier League.
taboo
To wrap this up, I suppose with toilet paper, it’s not generally known because toilet activity is a taboo subject. With male and female behaviour when texting it’s not a taboo but is equally invisible to men. Guys are unlikely to discover this because they are always going to count as a guy and women don’t send kisses to guys, especially if they work at the garage. I asked my muse if she sends kisses to other men, I had a brief moment of anxiety before she said no, apart from her father, so how would a guy ever discover?