Soon after WIRED’s global editorial director started in 2023, she sent me a message on Slack. By accident, I hearted it. A message from my very serious, very new boss. It haunts me to this day.
I have no recollection of what the message said, only a lingering, heart-shaped shame. When I realized my error several hours after the deed, I panicked. Do I remove it? Make a joke? Quit my job? Ultimately, I swapped it with a 👍 sometime after work hours and prayed she would register exactly none of this.
The reason for my mistake is that the ❤️ had become a go-to reaction on Slack, which displays the top-three most-used emoji when you hover over a comment. That is to say, hearting my boss’s message was part of a larger problem: I was hearting messages from colleagues all the time. The more I looked, the more I realized this was happening everywhere. Slack, of course, but also in one-on-one texts, group chats—anywhere I could react with a ❤️, I would.
It wasn’t just me. A literal war reporter on the front lines in Ukraine hearted my Signal message saying I’d get back to him about a pitch. My main friends’ group chat is awash in hearted messages of all types. Of course, my wife and I heart each other’s texts constantly, to the point that failing to do so has become a subtle hint that one of us is either very busy or cranky. The heart emoji has clearly become a default way of subtly communicating with each other. The question is, communicating what? Its meaning seems to shift with the context to the point that it no longer has a fixed meaning at all—except when you use it wrongly.
Neil Cohn, a cognitive scientist who focuses on visual communication and an associate professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, tells WIRED in an email that it’s essential to understand the context—and, thus, meaning—of a heart emoji before you use it.
“Otherwise you get into trouble if you send the wrong person a red heart instead of a white heart!” Cohn says. “This has become a serious issue, given that lawsuits have even hinged on whether sending an emoji to coworkers constitutes sexual harassment.”
Yikes.
Broadly speaking, the heart shape has been used as a symbol for hundreds of years, and it too has shifted over time. “A prominent theory is that the silphium seed from Africa in ancient times was shaped like a heart and was used as an aphrodisiac,” Cohn says. “So it was associated with sex, and only later, via Christians, did it become associated with love.”
Those Christians took the idea of the Sacred Heart and went wild for millennia, popularizing the heart as a symbol for adoration in Western culture to the point that it now evokes Hallmark and shitty chocolates more than it does the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Hearts were among the first Unicode symbols created in the early internet of the 1990s that would later become the emoji of today, according to Emojipedia. Released as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993, “❤️” initially shared the name of its pre-color predecessor, “Heavy Black Heart.” By 2014, ❤️ was being cited as the most popular “word” in the world. It’s now a default emoji virtually anywhere you can type—and that’s where the problems come in.