Since moving to Italy from the U.S., I’ve noticed how much more spontaneous social interactions are here. It’s common for me to run into someone I know and have them invite me to coffee on the spot. Instead of receiving a text, I’m more likely to get a voice message or a phone call from someone I just met. But this is only true of the friends I’ve made here. When communicating with friends back home, I text them or send voice messages. But mostly, I do the dance of having to schedule a catch-up like it’s a work meeting. So when The Cut writer Kathleen Walsh published an essay recently about feeling like she should be able to cold call her friends, it resonated with me deeply. “In the past 20 years, a new social boundary seems to have calcified among people my age,” Walsh wrote. “It is no longer appropriate to pick up your phone and call your friend whenever you feel like it.”
In February 2026, a YouGov survey found that 68% of surveyed Americans said text messaging had replaced at least some of the phone calls they used to make. More than one-third of those surveyed said text messaging had replaced most of their calls. While there isn’t any data to quantify its frequency, as Walsh pointed out, if a phone call does happen, it’s becoming increasingly more common to text before you call. But in a time when loneliness has been declared a public health crisis, Americans are saying fewer words to each other, and it’s trendy to be nostalgic for the ’90s – why isn’t the friendly cold call making a comeback?
