The other night, my roommates and I were sitting around, drinking wine and talking about standard girl stuff — you know, saying mean things about girls we don’t know just because they’re pretty — when we heard the sound of the notorious text message beep. Everyone froze.

There was a moment of silence, and we all sat there in a tableau of excitement and fear. Who was the lucky girl? Nobody wanted to be the first to reach for her phone, because what if her screen did not read “one new text message?” The dream would be shattered. As long as we didn’t look, we all had hope it was our phone that had beeped. Was it our phone holding an invitation for a potential sexual rendezvous that night?

Then, all at once, the room was a flurry of movement as we reached into our purses to learn the truth. Five of the girls let out sighs of disappointment, and one of us officially became the winner of the unspoken text message game. She basked in the glory of her victory on the inside, but tried not to smile on the outside. She knew she had to act cool, calm and collected, if for no other reason than to spare our feelings. Of course we were jealous, but we had to act happy for her. We knew the day would come when we would be the winner of the text message game.

We spent the next 40 minutes analyzing the message and coming up with a strategic rebuttal. Text messaging in the 21st century is a war zone. There are all sorts of elements to consider before we can respond to the initial battle cry, and we need an entire army to come up with a return plan of attack. In this particular case, we knew a response to “Wat R U doin 2nite” had to be succinct, clever and just standoffish enough for him to retain interest in the conversation.

The first thing we did was ask the chosen girl what he had said to her in parting the las time they hung out. When she left his bed the morning after a night of awkward sex, did he brave morning breath and kiss her goodbye? Or did he lie there feigning sleep as she sneaked out the side door, trying not to wake up his roommate? If the scenario was more reminiscent of the latter, we would advise her to play coy. It’s the text message version of playing hard to get — instead of walking the other way when she runs into him at a party, she should respond noncommittally. “Don’t know if I’m going out yet” is a standard line to get him to beg for your presence. And if he doesn’t take the bait, either he hasn’t learned the finer points of text-message-based hookups, or… he’s just not that into you.

Once we figured out what the reply was actually going to say, we had to deal with the finer points of timing. We asked her how long it had been since she’d heard from him. As anyone with a vagina knows, this is crucial information — it tells us how long to wait before writing back. Poor suckers have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. For every day since you’ve heard from him, add 10 minutes of delay. It’s just common sense.

And if he added a period or any other form of punctuation in his text, there’s an entire alternative game plan to follow. If he’s using semicolons or quotation marks, he must be an asshole.

In a culture where we hang out with the opposite sex in the flesh much less than we interact electronically, it seems actually picking up the phone and calling another human being is about as old-fashioned as using the Pony Express. Gone are the days of women sitting alone by the phone on a Friday night, waiting for that guy to call. Now we sit surrounded by our BFF’s with phones in our pockets, waiting for that guy to send the confirmation txt msg and let us know he’s 4 real.