Electronically Ever After

What is it that makes a person so much easier to love in paragraph form? I have had lunch with a person or two that I know, and care about, and still thought, ‘you would be so much better as an email right now.’ I have even allowed myself to fantasize about having our lunchtime chat over respective laptops, where my companion would be smarter, funnier, and far more interesting.

During one of the busiest times of my life I was in a long-distance relationship, and naturally, we had to resort to emailing quite often. To be frank, this man was grammar erotica. His writing was fresh, and intelligent without being verbose. His vocabulary and sentence structure were outstanding. And, lord, did he ever know how to turn up the heat with those well-placed commas, and the occasional, (biting my lip)…proper use of semi-colons. Is it getting warm in here? I was hooked, and deeply in love. I was in love, however, not with the man, but with phonics.

We were at one of his favorite restaurants on one of our dates, when my inner man-monitor declared, he’s not the one. My inner man-monitor can be a very unreasonable woman sometimes, so I really wanted her to be specific. I wanted her to explain herself, and give me sound reasons as to why he was not the one when we were so clearly right for one another. By all counts, if you ran the numbers, we were annoyingly perfect for each other. We had similar family backgrounds, similar values, similar goals, and similar interests. We were the same age, we both considered ourselves musical, and we had a phenomenal electronic connection. However, that night, it occurred to me that the idea of our relationship going much further than the table from which we were sitting across made me extremely itchy.

It certainly wasn’t anything he did wrong, it just had taken me some time to realize that I simply liked him more on paper than I did in person. It was one of the sad little glitches of being a prose junkie. By my best estimate, it’s not a reasonable thing to request from a man who thinks he wants to marry you to communicate with you in text message only. I believe someone wrote down somewhere that you can’t tell your husband, “hush, love, go and grab your laptop” anytime he wanted conversation, or foreplay for that matter. So, in the end, you just can’t trust the emoti-con. You’ve got to love out loud.