Canadian Down Under

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Email Hell

I need to stop doing this.

I need to stop meeting men of interest that live in different countries....alright, on different continents.

It makes me mental, because how do you communicate (and I use the word loosely....)? Email. It's not my forte. I mean, I don't mind writing, but I do mind waiting. Waiting for an answer that is. And the longer I have to wait the more sure I am that I've said something wrong - well, not really said something wrong, but that a sarcastic joke has been taken the wrong way.... how do you know?

So everybody's different. I've known guys who answer the second you send them anything and then there are others that seem to take forever to write. Although it's most likely the former is obsessive and the latter is disinterested, it's also possible that the former is polite and the latter is just busy, but how is one to know via email?

I've written about this before - wondering how long you should wait to write back and my difficulties with figuring out the balance between too eager and rude - my upbringing taught me to answer straight away - which is fine for communicating with friends, but not so fine with dealing with men because they view that as too eager - but I think waiting weeks is rude. So what's the right time frame to answer? And even more importantly, what's the right time frame for a response?

The current emailing that's going on was initially me answering within a day or two and him taking 4-5 days to answer. It got to the point where it annoyed me (rational? probably not) so one time I didn't answer him straight away and by day 5 I got a follow-up email - which didn't explicitly ask why I wasn't answering but the message was in there. So feeling remorseful, I answered straight away and then so did he and a few days later I wrote back (is anyone getting sick of this yet?) and now it's been over a week since I've heard from him. Yesterday I even sent a follow-up mentioning how cold it was here and that I thought it was the cold breeze coming from where he lived (trying to make a joke) and was it something I said (see earlier paragraph about worrying if sarcastic joke goes wrong..)

No answer.

To tell the truth, I'm not really worried. For a couple of reasons: 1. I can't actually think of anything I've done/said that is cause for ex-communication and 2. I'm not really that fussed whether this works out or not. It's kind of an impossible thing anyway, but I won't go into that... It's just I hate not knowing what's going on.

I think I need to stop this stuff. These impossible long-distance ?? (can't really call them relationships...) have no long-term payoff and in the short-term they're making me mental. All this anguish for one weekend...having trouble seeing how its worth it.....

1 Comments:

  • I SO hear you!
    I've got a guy friend (kinda close, kinda distant) right now who i'm waiting on. i sent him an email, he responded 36 hours later with something that was so personal that i felt it needed to be addressed quickly, but managed to wait 24 hours. now i'm going into day 3 of waiting for his response...
    !?
    Is it email, or just boys? I used to hang onto the mantra "boys suck" - think it's getting to be time to dust that one off again!

    By Blogger Lissa, at 4:13 PM  

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