Suppose a woman wakes up one morning and the first thing she sees when she picks up her phone is a text message from her long-term boyfriend.

Aw, that’s sweet, right?

But suppose, after blinking away the sleep from her eyes and moving the tangled hair out of her face, she reads the text message and realizes that it’s a serious marriage proposal.

At risk of making generalizations, I think it’s safe to say that this message will not have the desired effect.

In fact, it will almost certainly have the opposite of the desired effect, no matter how eloquently the words in the text message are phrased or how long the couple has been together.

Now, if we take the exact same words from that beautiful text message but we imagine they are spoken by our hypothetical boyfriend to his hypothetical girlfriend in the confines of a dimly lit booth at her favorite upscale restaurant, we can hope that the chances of a favorable response increase dramatically.

Obviously.

What’s the point?

We should be just as careful in the choosing of the context and form of our messaging as we are about its actual content.

Even in less dramatic circumstances, it makes a difference.