It’s called the “typing awareness indicator,” and a few months ago, my therapist ordered me to disable it on my phone. “It’s causing you too much anxiety,” she said, pointing to the iPhone I had in a white-knuckle grip. “It’s giving monumental weight to matters of a text message.”

But we weren’t even talking about text messages ... exactly. We were talking about the time between text messages. Specifically that little gray bubble with the ellipses that pops up on your iPhone while the person on the other end of your text message is writing a response.

Or, in my case — in the particularly high-stakes conversation at hand — it was the bubble that popped up to indicate typing, then disappeared to show he had stopped. Then came back up to show typing, then went away again. Then returned for what seemed like an eternity (he must be writing something deep, right?) only to produce a response so benign (you know, like “cool” or “ya”) that it could only be topped by the humiliation of the bubble never returning at all (meaning he was flat-out ignoring me). Which I would know, of course, because I could see that he had read my message (that’s called a “read receipt”).

“The three dots shown while someone is drafting a message in iMessage is quite possibly the most important source of eternal hope and ultimate letdown in our daily lives,” said Maryam Abolfazli, a writer in Washington who has tackled the topic. “It’s the modern-day version of watching paint dry, except you might be broken up with by the time the dots deliver.”