Help! My Boyfriend Never Calls

Eddie hears from a reader who claims her boyfriend doesn't call enough. Does she have a point or is she just being too needy?

Writing in the Globe and Mail, David Eddie hears from a reader who's boyfriend is 'fantastic', but with one glitch: he never calls.

I’ve been seeing my boyfriend for four months and I think he’s fantastic. But we keep running into the same issue: He hardly texts or calls even though I keep telling him that this bothers me. On several occasions I’ve texted or called him and didn’t receive a reply until the next day. Sometimes I wait for him to make the effort and three or four days will go by before I hear anything.

I understand that he’s really busy with work and his job requires him to travel out of the country. I’m not asking to see him every day. But if you care about someone, shouldn't you be curious about how they’re doing? When we’re together everything is great, so I sometimes feel selfish asking for his time. Am I being too needy?

Eddie responds:

Your problem could be partly technological/evolutionary as well as romantic.

If you think about it, our poor 50,000-year-old hunter-gatherer brains have had to acclimatize awfully quickly to the current climate of constant, instant communication.

In hunter-gatherer days, if your girlfriend lived in the next village and you wanted to see how her day was going, it took a messenger three days to walk across the scorching savanna, eating berries and raw lizard, and drinking cactus juice, to ask; and three days to return with the answer. (The previous sentence was “inspired by” historical fact, same way James Cameron’s new spelunker clunker Sanctum was “inspired by” true events.)

These days we stagger around staring at our handhelds, frantically Facebooking and phoning, typing and texting, only looking up when we bump into a lamppost or get in a car crash. ...

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