I know some men refuse to use emojis because they think they're silly or cheesy. But I have to say, when men use emojis, they make me feel good. Is it crazy that a heart or a rose emoji makes me feel like a man's more interested?

--Wondering

It's easy to misinterpret tone in texts. However, emojis are basically the cartoon cousins of commas, which can make the difference between a quiet evening at home and an evening spent handcuffed facedown while the forensics team digs up your backyard for skeletal remains. (If only you'd tucked the commas into the appropriate places when you texted, "I love cooking my dogs and my grandma.")

Emojis in courtship were the subject of two studies from the Kinsey Institute. In the more recent one, social psychologist Amanda Gesselman and her colleagues found a link between emoji use and maintaining a connection beyond the first date, as well as more romantic interactions and more sex (over the year that participants were surveyed about).

I suspect emojis are an especially helpful tool for men to use in dating. Research by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that men, in general, don't have women's emotional fluency -- that is, women's ease in identifying and expressing emotion. Emojis help men communicate warmth and interest in a woman easily and comfortably. This in turn keeps women from getting mad that men don't show their feelings -- or mistaking a lack of expressiveness for a lack of feeling.

So it's no surprise you appreciate the emojis. Still, there's much that remains unexplored in these studies. For example, do people who use more emojis get more dates and sex, or do people who get more dates and sex use more emojis? And do emojis play well with everybody, or do they sometimes kill a developing connection? "Wait...a 55-year-old man just sent me an entire screen of cartoon eggplants?"

Of course, emojis could more charitably be viewed as a classic form of communication. The medium was just different back around 2000 B.C., when the pharaoh would dispatch the eunuch with stone tablets covered in pictures of dogs, beetles, and mummies. Message: "Dinner is at 6, unless there's a plague of locusts."

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.