The Lost Art of Calling Someone on the Damn Phone

My wife makes fun of how easily I cry. She’s more stoic than I could ever be and thinks it’s especially funny how movies—not just well-written death scenes, but most Christmas movies and hit-you-over-the-head Hollywood sentimentality—always get me. She plays this game when we’re in a movie theater where she’ll look over at me to guess the exact scene I will start crying. At home, she’ll just ask out loud, without looking, “Crying?” The easiest, she’s told me, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. The emotional climax comes over a phone call, and, she says, “You’ve always been weird about phone calls.”

To explain the movie, Barry, played by Adam Sandler—my favorite case for him as a “serious” actor—is lonely, socially anxious, and in constant conflict with the other side of the phone. He’s extorted in a phone-sex scam by a sleazy mattress seller, peak Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The film makes you, like Barry, afraid of the phone, afraid of what’s behind it. If you watch the movie in theaters, the phone ringing is physically jarring.

Then, Barry finds love in Lena, played by Emma Watson. Most of the film is a back-and-forth of Barry’s crippling anxiety preventing him from asking her out. Eventually, they both end up in Hawaii—Lena on a work trip, Barry on a fake work trip that he made up to chase after her. As soon as he gets in, he calls her from a payphone, which happens to be in the middle of a parade. “I’m standing in my hotel room,” he says, with a finger plugged into his opposite ear. He follows it up with, “Do you have a boyfriend?” The payphone light is shining down on him, they’re laughing; it’s first phone call of his life that is a source of joy, true joy.

Barry in Punch-Drunk Love calls his love interest. It’s the first phone call in a long time that brings him joy.

When they return from Hawaii, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s goons come to beat up Barry and his love. That makes him stand up to the scam in one of my favorite scenes of all time. He's holding a disconnected landline throughout it. The phone is no longer an antagonist. It’s an ally. It's a direct line to the person he loves. It lights up his life.

That’s the exact point I start to cry. For me, it’s as beautiful as movies get, because it perfectly illustrates something about modern life: You may think the phone is just a tool for making doctor appointments or dutifully offering your mom Mother’s Day wishes or getting scammed, but it’s actually a conduit to true, visceral emotion.

I fear we’re losing track of that. Too many of us are the old Barry.

So, before you keep reading this, stop—call someone. Could be anyone. I’d advise someone close to you, someone you love, but a prospective love interest also works. Or a friend. Or just someone you’d like to get to know. Call them to say what’s up. Talk for five minutes.

See how that felt? Hopefully it unintentionally ran long. Hopefully you both were late to some other “more important” event in your respective schedules. And if it was awkward or went short, you survived, and that’s a reminder that you’re still alive. In any case, I contend that a phone call is one of life’s great joys and most mystical experiences.

As far as communication advancements go, phone calls blow my mind the most. The mail system solved a logistical problem. Instant messaging is incredible, but transferring zeros and ones into text makes linear sense; it’s the kind of code-cracking that, given enough time, you could do yourself. But converting physical vibrations into electrical signals, sending them across the world, and then putting them back into vibrations so our ear drums can understand—it’s absurd. And it’s absurd that smartphones and instant messaging, what’s come after the telephone, have created a world where using this God-like power is secondary, outdated, because it’s too direct.

The last few years have offered a steady drumbeat of portentous stats about the phone. Usually, it’s younger people—those who grew up with texting and social media—who are building the coffin. A couple years ago, CBS News reported that 90 percent of Gen Z is “anxious about speaking on the phone.” A 2024 survey by a UK-based telecom company found that 23 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds never pick up phone calls. There’s even a name for this anxiety: telephobia. And even though it seems to be more common the younger you are, as with most things Gen Z gets a bad rap for, it’s not all their fault. In 2021, the academic news site The Conversation reported anxiety from 76 percent of millennials and 40 percent of baby boomers. You go further back in time, or higher in age, and the numbers are a little better, but the trend is clear: A phone call makes people uncomfortable.

I’ve never felt that, even though I’m Gen Z and have never known life without instant messaging. This essay came about because of my attitude at a recent Esquire meeting on modern men's etiquette. We were discussing interpersonal problems, and about half the discussion was in reference to texting: How to text a potential love interest, how to handle read receipts, how to be an engaging texter. I was, respectfully, disgusted. It must have been visible, because a coworker called me out.

“Well Luke calls his wife throughout the day instead of texting her,” they said.

I said, Yeah, if I have a question about our evening plans, what we want to eat for dinner, or if I just have something to tell her, I call her. If she doesn’t pick up, voice memo. Thirty seconds of hearing her voice is better to me than thirty minutes of tapped-out back-and-forth.

Call me old school, but I think if you are really into someone—even just for, like, casual sex—you should be calling them. You don’t have to call them with every thought you have throughout the day. But don’t text them with that, either. Instead, wait until you have something to say, and pick up the phone. Ask them out with your real, human voice. You'll both feel more excited about whatever relationship it is that you have.

Also, don’t try to schedule a phone call. I guarantee you’re both busy and can come up with a handful of excuses why you shouldn’t ring each other up to bullshit about how life has been recently. I also guarantee you that neither of you are actually that busy.

A lot of this, especially when it relates to work, gets hidden behind, “Oh, this could have been an email,” or “A text would be quicker.” I don’t have a grand, unifying theory of how we got here, but I do think work culture is a part of it.

A decade ago, in order to save costs, JPMorgan decided to offer its employees the option of eliminating voicemail. Roughly two-thirds of them took the offer. Coca-Cola had done something similar, and upwards of ninety percent opted to cut it loose. It could be budding telephobia, but it was also about efficiency—for employees, and for the companies, who saved a lot of money. Today, we work from home as much as from the office and we’re getting pinged on Slack and on email and on text. The screen time tracker on my phone tells me that on workdays I get a notification every five minutes, and that doesn’t even include emails. Who wants to deal with the phone on top of that?

No wonder people seem genuinely afraid of it, like Barry in Punch-Drunk Love. I’ve heard friends and coworkers say, in both their work and personal lives, they would screen a call in favor of text, even if they’re already on their phone. Why should we let our work-life optimization, cost-efficiency bullshit infect our actual human relationships?

When my wife and I were moving-in together, before we were married, her father died suddenly. Checked into the hospital one day, and less than a week later he was gone. She’d lost her dad. A few months after, past the worst of the grief but not really out of it, it was time to shut down his phone number. Her mom called her and her sister and warned them: If you want to listen to his voicemail, you have a few days left. This was him dying a second time; nowhere near as extreme but no less fraught, a confirmation of what had happened a few months prior.

Since he’s died and his voicemail has lapsed, I’ve totally lost the memory of my father-in-law’s voice. My wife still has it. But even though her larger pool of memories and deeper emotional connection helps piece it back together, she admits it’s not totally right—certain words and inflections are wrong.

She’s a linguist by education, my wife, and has studied language acquisition. She can point to plenty of studies that attempt to quantify a truth we all know intuitively: Our memories, especially as they pertain to language, are ephemeral. My wife has told me to try a simple exercise: Think of someone you were once close to but haven’t spoken to in years. Remember the way they laughed? Easy. Remember the way their voice sounded? Probably doable. Now, try to make that voice say a sentence. Almost impossible.

I don’t mean imply that every phone call in your life is of that level of importance. Nor do I condone the suggestions of Substack and LinkedIn optimizers, who make spreadsheets of how many times they will see their family for the rest of their lives. That’s insane. I’m just saying that there is someone, somewhere on the other side of a phone, that wants to hear your voice. The content of the call does not matter. The voice does. You. Yours. On a screen, your texts look just like everyone else’s; there is nothing to differentiate the love of your life from a coworker besides a few grammatical ticks. Your voice will never sound like everybody else’s. Nor will your best friend’s, your wife’s, or your father-in-law’s. The rest of your life is on the other side of the line. Not the screen.

After I write these last sentences, I’m going to call my wife and ask if we have an onion for the chicken stock I’m going to make tonight. It’ll be the best phone call I’ve had in my life.