You shouldn’t text your ex. That one fling from your vacation last year. The stranger you gave your number to at the gym. The person you went on two dates with and called a wash, the one you bummed a shot off that night you were too drunk to stand. The person you had a crush on in high school and swore to catch up with the next time you were in town for the holidays. That one night stand. The might have been. The one who was almost The One, but, for whatever reason, wasn’t.

Don’t text them.

Don’t spend your time on something that won’t go anywhere. It’s not worth the chase or the fight or the effort, and nobody will save your dignity by dragging you away from something that was only ever lukewarm from the start. Chances are, you’ll make a fool of yourself — because love is making a fool of yourself anyway — but chances are you will reduce yourself to something neither you nor they can respect. Stand your ground. We all love the chase, but if the chase is all we love, your time might be better spent on something else, not somebody else, much less the same somebody all over again. Wait until you’re ready to stay with what you’ve chased down. Wait until you know what you want. Wait until you know who you want.

But don’t text them.

If you’re brave and you’re sure, maybe you can call them again. Maybe you remember their voice, or maybe you don’t. But it is their voice that can either confirm a million beliefs or validate a thousand doubts. Either their voice will stir something in you, or it won’t, and there’s your answer either way. Maybe you’ll remember why it is that you stopped texting them, talking to them, seeing them them in the first place, or maybe something else will ignite in your mind again and you’ll honestly believe that maybe, just maybe this time will be different. Maybe you’ll agree to catch up, and maybe you’ll both walk out of the restaurant and realize that this is it, or maybe you’ll get on the subway and miss each other instantly or maybe something else will happen when you hear their voice and they hear yours, but you’ll never know unless you call.

But you shouldn’t text them.

You shouldn’t text them because a text is the easy way out and a text is passive and whoever’s turn it is to reply is the one with the upper hand. Hope will never survive that kind of power volley. It will never last. You shouldn’t text because how do you spark passion in a text? How do you share a part of yourself in a text. And life is too short to not share yourself, to wait for a person to grow on you before you take a risk and share yourself, or to try to make yourself feel more than you really do. Like can turn into love, but all the great love stories I’ve ever heard somehow all agree that those two people knew they loved each other when they realized they’d somehow been in love all along. And save a divine act of timing and vulnerability, no text will really remind you that maybe it was a bad idea to walk away when you did the first time around.

But a phone call might.

You deserve something more than your own sloppy seconds. You deserve a pounding heart and a stomach that does flips and words that are fighting to be said faster than you can type. You deserve to want to scream your feelings from the rooftops. You deserve what drove Shakespeare to his sonnets and the Beatles to their lyrics. Love is too important to wait for a message to be delivered. Love is worth saying. Love is worth finding your voice.