Text arrives with the tone removed, so you add one, and the one you add comes from whatever mood you are already in. Three letters can be warm, bored, hurt or sarcastic, and nothing on the screen tells you which. That is why written arguments escalate: both people are responding to a voice they invented.

Use the rule that when it matters, you change the channel. A thirty second phone call settles what forty messages cannot, and hearing somebody actually laugh ends the whole thing. If calling feels like too much, ask plainly whether they are annoyed instead of guessing for two days.