I just realised why Cowboys don't dance with their wives!

[Phillip Dampier]

as a well off business man, Jack would have had a cell phone. His propensity for showing off would have made sure he got one. They'd have been huge to match his ring and his pornstache. 

An amusing side note on this question - Childress wouldn't have been set up for wireless until the late 1980s at the earliest due to its rural location and license awarding procedure.  He would have passed away before then, but urban areas did have a precursor to cellular phones with VHF-based mobile phones (rotary dial).  They were obscenely expensive and anyone with a scanner radio could listen in on all of your conversations.  Childress wouldn't have had that either.  It seems clear the Twist family would have had personal computers in the house by then, however.

It seems questionable whether Ennis ever had a phone.  His call to Texas was at the pay phone, and not once was their any indication either one of them reached out and touched each other through the Bell System (rates are lower after 9pm!).

[David In Indy]

An amusing side note on this question - Childress wouldn't have been set up for wireless until the late 1980s at the earliest due to its rural location and license awarding procedure.  He would have passed away before then, but urban areas did have a precursor to cellular phones with VHF-based mobile phones (rotary dial).  They were obscenely expensive and anyone with a scanner radio could listen in on all of your conversations.  Childress wouldn't have had that either.  It seems clear the Twist family would have had personal computers in the house by then, however.
It seems questionable whether Ennis ever had a phone.  His call to Texas was at the pay phone, and not once was their any indication either one of them reached out and touched each other through the Bell System (rates are lower after 9pm!).

Lord have mercy, who could ever forget those 1980's computers?

The very first computer I bought was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It was a "color computer" and it hooked up to a television. It had a tape drive which was actually just a tape recorder. It had 16K memory in it and no hard drive. I paid $400 for it at Target, and a year later I bought a Laser (IBM) XT computer. It had two disk drives on the front and it ran at
8 MHZ and 10MHZ. I bought it at Sears, and a few weeks later I bought a hard drive for it (you needed the hard drive for the computer to run at 10 MHZ). It was a 40 mb hard drive. It was very complicated to install because I had to flip all these little red switches on the back of the computer and then partition the hard drive. DOS couldn't recognize anything above 30 mb. I partitioned it as a 30/10. It was an internal hard drive (they sold external hard drives too) so I had to open up the computer to install it. It was a nightmare but I finally got the whole thing up and running.

The 1980's really wasn't all that long ago. It's amazing how fast the technology has changed in such a short period of time.

[Front-Ranger]

I was thinkin (being like Alma Jr.) today about this line, and I realized that Lureen's jab at Jack probably reminded him very much of his father. His answer was a classic way to defang the attack without ignoring it completely. "Ain't never give it no thought." Even the way Lureen says it, "Husbands...don't never want to dance with their wives." I think she is deliberately putting on a rural Wyoming accent too. Jack is realizing that he's married to a person like his father, which is what abused children often do. They select their mates in order to try to work through the unresolved problems once and for all, but they end up just caught up in childhood family disfunctions again.

[Brown Eyes]

I think I actually had a dream about this topic last night... or something... because it's very much on my mind this morning.

Sorry if what I'm about to say has been said before.  This comment by Lureen about husbands not wanting to dance with their wives seems just so ironic (and actually a possible "bookend" moment) when thinking about how Lureen and Jack met.  The fact that by the end, Jack is refusing to dance with her... is such a contrast to the lovely slow dance that they have at the beginning.  I mean, clearly, when the camera zooms in on Jack's face during that early dance, his wistful, sad face implies that he's unhappy (and probably thinking about Ennis).  But, still, at this point, he's willing to dance with her... and in a way that she probably perceived to be romantic.

Really, I don't know why this topic was so much on my mind this morning.  I guess it's just a symptom of being a Brokie.