Immaculate Rejection

Are e-mail, instant-messaging and texting just a great way to avoid intimacy? by M.K. Apruzzese


And sometimes email can mask serious issues. Take my ex, a compulsive emailer who used writing me as a distraction from a job he hated. I counted his emails one day: 20, just during business hours. If he wasn’t attractive and if I had no interest in him, I would have thought he was a stalker. But he was and I was, so I went with it. Besides, I loved the attention. Eventually, though, it got frustrating. “Please,” I finally wrote in an email. “I’m getting finger cramps. Can’t we just use the phone?” A few minutes later my phone actually rang. Finally, I thought. He had used the phone. To send me a text message.

In the end, compulsive email man didn’t want to be in a relationship. If I had heeded the red flags, I would have seen that the emails were his way of keeping me at arm’s length. Perhaps that is the biggest lesson to take away from all of this – email is certainly a cleaner, more efficient way of communicating, but any time it is used as the sole basis of a relationship it can get you into murky waters.

Email, text messaging, and IMing are, of course, here to stay. So how do we make sure we don’t end up in any of the above situations? Some ground rules could help. First, keep in mind that email is a form prone to miscommunication. Always assume that the reader will interpret what you’re writing in the extreme – so avoid all-caps (it reads like yelling), staccato sentences (they sound dismissive), and abbreviations like LOL or OMG (they translate as, “I still wish I was a teenager.”) Take extra pains to actually read your email before you hit send – if it even occurs to you that someone might take something the wrong way, delete it. And as the email recipient, be forgiving. Don’t automatically think someone is being curt because they don’t write long, run-on sentences. Assume they don’t have the time at that moment.

Online personals and social networking sites are great ways to meet. But lest you find yourself in the same place as Michelle or Kathy – where your email selves have a great relationship but the real thing is terrible – get to the meeting part pronto, at least within a week. If circumstances prevent you from meeting quickly, then cut down on the amount of emails you send. Otherwise you could be setting yourself up for a major disappointment.

Of course, there is no foolproof way to guard against being dumped via email. But you can try. Discuss the rules with your partner from the beginning, and if you’re an emaily couple, let him know that it there are big issues that need to be discussed, you want to do it in person – when you can see the subtle nuance of a look and hear the tone of a person’s voice.

But if you ever get an email like the one I got from my cowboy, do what I did and use the haphazardness of email to your advantage. “Accidentally” send him an email a few weeks later about your handsome, brilliant new boyfriend who is so much better than your ex in bed.

 

M.K. Apruzzese resides in Santa Monica, CA with her two cats, three laptops, Blackberry and two mobile phones, each which have unlimited text messaging rate plans. 


 

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