> more recently I seem to have decided to no longer greet my husband

This is the most interesting part. When you're dating someone, there are defined parts of the day where you start-and-then-stop interacting with them, so there are greetings exchanged, etc. When you're married (or in a very steady relationship), it's more like one continuous conversation; since it never ends, it never has to begin again.

Just had to say that your last sentence was surprisingly touching (obviously IMO). I have my own qualms about the article in the OP as I've studied written/spoken language patterns a good amount in my time, but your point of relationships evolving into longer and longer 'continuous conversations' is a great way of putting it.

I just started computational linguistics at uni and I thought this was very interested (albeit very light hearted)

Could you elaborate on your qualms?

It can be touching or depressing depending on the day :)

It's the same with close friends (ie people I talk to more than once a day)- our conversation logs are just one steady stream of dialog.

This is fascinating. Looking back on my ~4 year relationship with my soon-to-be-wife, I notice a lot of parallels. Looking back even at our last week of texts, it's all transactional and logistical things: pickup times and places, confirmations, and quick tasks.

It's not necessarily that our communication has lost that "fresh love" spark, merely that it's developed and aged (like a good cheese) into deeper, more meaningful transactions that happen in person. We no longer need to reaffirm anything over texts, because everything meaningful happens in person.

This x100 (just speaking from probably a few years further out that where you are now)! On the other hand, though, richer messaging apps have certainly made a lot of things much easier (sending map locations, sending pics/vids, links, etc) than SMS/MMS.

The same patterns hold true with email, btw. This isn't at all unique to texting.

I'm reminded of the time Facebook prompted me to "reconnect" with my beautiful wife, because we hadn't communicated in some time. Ah, no, we just don't communicate with each other via Facebook.

Sadly, most of my historic data (we've been together 11 years; married 6) is lost in ancient phones. One difference I believe we would observe compared with the OP is how prominent xxx would appear (representing kisses, I might add). We made a tacit agreement early in our relationship to always add those and/or an expression of love at the end of messages and conversations. One of those little things that can get lost in transactional stuff, so I'm glad we made the effort (even if it's now mostly habit, it's still valuable).

>> We made a tacit agreement early in our relationship to always add those and/or an expression of love at the end of messages and conversations.

Right on. Thanks of sharing this tip.

This is great to see as I've been working on a similar project to try to visualize relationships by looking at the number of texts sent over time.

If anyone would like help generating similar analyses of their texting data, I'd be glad to help as I have some machinery set up to do so!

Here's a prototype site I put together that takes iPhone SMS backups and generates a graph of how many texts you've sent over time:

http://herbsusmann.com/relationships/

I would be interested in trying this out for myself. Any ideas or open source on extracting the data from phones (specifically the iPhone?).

I think the iPhone may use a SQLite DB for messages?

It does, and it's totally possible if you haven't encrypted the phone's backups and lost the password* like I did :(

*I swear I didn't put a password on it but for some reason it got one...

Interesting, and sweet.

According to the history of SMS on Wikipedia, the notion was conceived before I met my wife, but the first SMS was sent almost five years after we married.

I really enjoyed this thanks for sharing and I have bookmarked your site for future reference. It seems like a great idea if you keep it up which I hope you do.

At first, looking at her picture, I thought her skirt was a data mosaic of the text messages. That would make a nice pattern actually.

Case sensitive word clouds, it's like looking at trypophobia images :)

But by the looks of it, wouldn't have made much difference anyway.

such a great analysis! Is there any space in this to disrupt? I mean to make things as before!

always reminded by this xkcd comic whenever people share observations about their relationships

http://xkcd.com/523/

LOL.

Very interesting article among all apple crap.

it was my mistake to say bad about apple. Sorry apple fans.

Your first mistake was writing a comment that didn't really add anything (if all you want is to express approval, click the upvote button) and your second mistake was complaining about it.

I think this topic would be more interesting: "How Text Messages Change from Marriage to Divorce"