Mavericks Messages contact drop-down phone numbers disappear

One of the best things I have found moving from a pc to a mac is the messages application. I use it to connect to our internal jabber chat service as well as facebook, google+, and sms.

I have condensed and associated my sms, facebook, google+, and jabber connections for each of my contacts. This makes it easy for me to collect all my correspondnces with each of my contacts in a single window. Genius!

However... sometimes I want to send an sms message to someone when I know they are not at their computer. When I pull down the dropdown menu at the top of the Messages window for a particular contact, the menu starts with all of their contact options but quickly collapses only showing me 1 or 2 contact methods. For example, when I pull down the menu for John, the menu contains several phone numbers, his facebook, his google+, and his jabber contact options. Within half a second, though, the menu has collapsed to just his jabber contact so I can no longer use Messages to send him and SMS.

Is there a setting to change this? Very unintuitive and frustrating.

Thanks for your help.