Back in the reckless days of freshman year, my (now very responsible) friend Carly once snipped her cell phone charger’s cord with scissors in a bout of drunken curiosity. This earned her big creativity points in the crazy-things-done-while-intoxicated competition, but it also left her with an inconveniently sobering problem: cell-phonelessness.

Poor Carly. The panicky situation ensuing from a sudden cell phone outage is a familiar experience for many of us: the frantic mass emails alerting the world of our unavailability, the constant itchiness to check voicemail through other people’s phones, the grim anguish of text message withdrawal. And, of course, there is the gradual, sickening realization that the tool that would best remedy our deplorable situation is oh-so-ironically our cell phone itself.

Sometimes, when this happens to me, my frenzy grows so uncontrollably intense that it momentarily self-annihilates into a nirvana-like state of internal reflection. Suddenly calm (and without incoming text messages to distract me), I find myself contemplating life’s biggest questions. For example, “How on earth did people survive before cell phones?”

Or that’s how things used to be. But then last spring, everything changed: I started dating the only 24-year-old left on the planet who still doesn’t have a cell phone at all! Mind-blowing, huh? At first, I had my doubts, but soon I found Martijn’s refusal to conform to societal expectations of accessibility rugged, exciting and even romantic. I wondered how we would manage to find each other on weekends. Martijn explained that we would agree on a time and place to meet, and then each be present at that time and place. (“So that’s what dates are!” I gushed to my friends.) I wondered how I would let him know when I had arrived at his house to visit. Martijn explained that I should ring the doorbell.

I was enamored. Our relationship had all the spontaneity and uncertainty that I’d been missing out on in my previous cell-phone-glued-to-ear boyfriend experiences. I didn’t need to know what he was doing at every moment, and he didn’t expect me to be constantly available, either. Sometimes I couldn’t reach him when I wanted to chat, but these moments of temporary disappointment helped stave off those notoriously destructive pangs of clinginess. And they were more than worth the freedom of unavailability that I was granted in return — Martijn could call my cell phone from Skype or a land line, but I was certainly not obligated to answer.

About a month in, Martijn made a joke via instant message that startled me: “Well if you can’t find me, you can always call me on my new cell phone.” “!!!!!!” I replied, expressing my shock in the eloquent poetry of Internet shorthand. He was jay-kaying, to my great relief. “I like that you don’t have a cell phone,” I murmured happily into the chat window. “I like that you like that I don’t have a cell phone,” he cooed back across cyberspace. (Yes, barf-y, I know.)

I quickly learned, however, that not everyone liked that Martijn didn’t have a cell phone. Our mutual friends detested the situation, actually. Martijn’s on-the-go unavailability made fluid socializing difficult and last-minute changes to plans impossible. Additionally, my boyfriend’s previous paramours had apparently expected his friends and roommates to provide a Martijn-messaging service when he couldn’t be reached. These friends and roommates made it quite clear to me that they did not, in fact, offer this service. And as soon as they thought I had some influence, they began their incessant appeals for me to convert Martijn to 21st-century connectedness.

I resisted their appeals for the most part, to the disappointment of everyone but Martijn. While I empathized with their frustration (and yes, shared it sometimes), I admired my boyfriend’s conviction too much to try to persuade him to abandon it. And through the success of our relationship, I had stumbled upon an important axiom of modern dating that I didn’t want to risk flouting: too much communication is bad.

This axiom might seem like the opposite of conventional wisdom, which dictates openness and expressiveness between partners for relationship health. I don’t disagree with this advice — much of the fun of dating derives from forcing one’s partner to share in one’s emotional trauma! However, I think we tend to be over-enthusiastic in our application of this concept. Because the modern world makes such an abundance of communicative venues available, we have come to expect everyone in a state of constant connectedness that becomes superficial in its ubiquity. There are countless conversations, but they all degrade to “What’s up?” “Not much.” These interactions offer little enrichment but can cause plenty of harm if one such mundane message goes unanswered.

As communication cheapens in its infinite availability, genuine connection ironically becomes more and more difficult. As a result, the members of our network-obsessed society grow increasingly alienated from each other. And so while it seems painfully old-fashioned, the no-cell-phone solution might actually be an astutely modern response to our present predicament of communication overload.

Rejecting the cell phone requires us to acknowledge and confront the bewildering loneliness that results from over-connection and to shift the focus of how we engage with our fellow humans from surface breadth to meaningful depth. Of course, rejecting the cell phone is also extremely inconvenient. As long as we’re cognizant, however, I don’t think complete rejection is necessary to make this crucial shift. So good news, Martijn: if you do ever feel like getting a cell phone (and calling me on it), I think I could probably cope.