I’ve written in the past about emojis, and how they’re used to communicate — or not. Well, recently I was texting someone and they used the crying emoji. It was a relatively serious conversation where they could actually have been crying, but the contents of the conversation aren’t what I’m thinking about right now.

The crying emoji was probably intended to indicate someone’s actual sadness or unhappiness. But when they used it, it seemed to detract from the seriousness of the conversation, because it’s a cartoony reaction. I was taken aback a little — were they actually crying, or were they doing this to indicate sarcastically (or another -ally) that I “made them cry”? What made it worse was that Google Messages (I have an Android) animated the emoji, and the animation continued to run without stopping, so while we talked that part of the screen just kept running the same crying animation, taking away the purported seriousness of it.

We eventually finished our conversation, but I never asked if the other person was actually crying or if it was just an emoji indicator of how upset they were. I don’t think I’m ever going to actually ask.

Emoji are a weird thing. We use them all the time to punctuate our messages — little smiley-faces, thumbs-ups, frowns, laughs, hearts, etc. But when we use them to indicate actual emotions (which, I mean, the words have the same root, right?) we can end up on a weirdly-slippery slope where it’s hard to know how emotional someone is actually being. In the case of my conversation, I didn’t know exactly how I should act. I made a choice, and hopefully it was the right one, but I’ll never really know.