Nevertheless, I’m here today to confess my sins and ask forgiveness from all those whose voicemails I have not listened to. To fully repent, I must make clear what I now know to be the truth: Phone calls are good, actually.

One of the best arguments in favor of phone calls will be obvious to anyone who’s ever gone back and forth for three days via email trying to pick a spot for Tuesday’s happy hour. Guhan Subramanian, the director of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, which teaches business- and law-school students the finer points of conflict resolution, argues that spoken conversation accomplishes far more in a shorter amount of time. In any discussion, “people are asking questions, probing, asking follow-up questions,” he says. “It’s obviously a lot easier to do when you’re over the phone or in person, compared to by email or text.”

This difference is what first pushed me back to phone calls. I wanted to hear my editor’s reactions to my story ideas and work them out in real time, not watch a “Paul is typing …” graphic linger ominously for 30 seconds before I knew the verdict. (Hi, Paul.) With friends, too, I wanted to rekindle the energy of live conversation. I wanted to crack a joke and hear someone laugh. I wanted my thumbs to have the occasional night off.

With so many digital avenues now available for reaching someone, the problem with phone calls is not that they’re inconvenient. It’s that they’re gauche. Especially for young people who tend to use their phones constantly, text messaging has become a roiling conversation that never really begins or ends. There’s often just as strong an expectation of an immediate answer to a text as there has traditionally been to a phone call—a phenomenon probably familiar to you if your significant other has ever fussed at you for tweeting or posting to Instagram Stories while you’ve left him or her on read. A phone call might still carry a more explicit demand for attention, but it’s actually far easier to explain being unable to answer a call than a text.

I’m not advocating a wholesale rejection of texting in favor of speaking. There are plenty of situations in which a text or email is plainly preferable, and for people with hearing impairments or other disabilities that make phone calls difficult, the development of real-time, text-based communication is a boon that shouldn’t be dismissed. For other people, a sense of anxiety can come from the on-the-spot nature of phone calls. Text communication allows anywhere from a moment to several days of self-editing.

But that itself can come with some drawbacks, according to Subramanian. “Over email, the message that’s received may not be the same as the message that’s sent,” he says. It’s missing the back-and-forth contextualization and clearer tone that spoken conversation provides.