Four words that get typed, read back once, and deleted. Everything after them was the actual message.
You have something to say and a person to say it to. You open the thread. Then you start writing an apology for the message before you have written the message, and somewhere in the middle of that you put the phone down.
The word people reach for is bother. I don't want to bother them. But bothering is not something you can do by accident with one text. It is a prediction: that they will read what you sent, feel an obligation, and quietly resent what it cost them.
That is a lot of weight for a guess you have no way to check.
Length has almost nothing to do with it. What makes a text costly is what it asks for.
"How are you?" asks for a status report on someone's whole life. "We should catch up soon" asks for calendar negotiation. "Hey, are you free?" asks for a commitment before saying what the commitment is for. All three are short. All three are friendly. All three are more work to answer than they look.
A message that costs nothing to receive does one of two things. It gives something, or it needs nothing back.
The shape to aim for is a message that is complete on arrival. If they reply, good. If they read it on a bus and never respond, nothing has gone wrong and nobody owes anybody a follow-up.
Send the thing itself, not a request to send the thing.
saw this and thought of you
this is the third time this week I've thought about that thing you said about your manager
found the place you told me about. you were right about the bread
Report, don't ask.
just spent forty minutes on hold to be told to call back tomorrow
got the job. no notes, just telling people
currently lost in a car park I have been in before
Name the gap and keep moving.
been ages. no news, just remembered you exist and liked that
this is a low-stakes hello with no agenda attached
The last one is the whole technique in a sentence. You can say what a message is for, and once you have, it stops being ambiguous, and ambiguity is where the obligation lives.
"Sorry to bother you." "Random, but." "Feel free to ignore this."
These feel considerate. They do the opposite of what they intend. An apology tells the reader that something costly is coming, so they brace before they get to the part that was never costly in the first place. It also puts them in the position of having to reassure you, which is a real request, made in the same breath as insisting you are not making one.
Delete the preamble and send what was underneath it. The message is almost always shorter and better than the version with the apology attached.
The gap makes the opener feel like it has to carry an explanation. It does not. A gap that neither of you mentioned is not a debt, and treating it as one is what turns four months into a year.
been thinking about you. no reason, no news
I have no excuse for the silence and I'm not going to invent one. how are the dogs
There is a longer version of this problem, and it has its own piece: what to text a friend after months of not talking.
Sometimes it is. If you are sending the fourth message in a row with no reply, or you need something at midnight that could wait until nine, or you are asking a person in a hard week to hold something heavy, the instinct is correct and worth listening to.
The instinct is worth ignoring when it fires on a single sentence that asks for nothing. That is the case where it is not protecting them. It is protecting you from the small risk of being ignored, and the cost of that protection is that the thought never gets sent at all.
None of this is an argument against texting the person you were thinking of. It is an argument that the message you were drafting was probably fine, and that the apology in front of it was the only part doing any harm.