Originally published in VoiceCatcher
Volume 2 by Portland Women
Writers
There I was, furiously punching away on my tiny keypad, periodically checking the cobblestone sidewalk to avoid the ubiquitous dog feces as I walked. Or stomped, rather. I seethed. I sent. Then I waited for the next msg to be lobbed back.
This, unfortunately, was my love life. It all started out
innocently enough. I’d been living in Spain for a few months, where citizens,
for the most part, have not embraced pooper-scoopers— hence the daily
defecation side-step. I was working at an ESL teacher training school and met a
charming British man on holiday with his father. After pity-partying my way
through the Christmas holidays while I watched stylishly clad Spanish families
walk the narrow streets to an endless soundtrack of church bells, he was a
welcome distraction, breaking up my loneliness and anxiety with a constant
smile and baffling phrases such as “slagging off,” “silly git,” and “bloody
(fill in with endlessly various nouns).” We laughed all the time, and he made
sure to constantly tell me just how much he adored me.
He’d look at me from across a room, and we’d both freeze,
arrested in giddy, early love, our hormone- and neurochemical-addled brains
bubbling over with exhilaration. During the weeks we spent together before his
return to England, he betrayed his hopelessly romantic core, pulling me on
elevators for furtive, heady make-outs, slipping notes inside the piles of
paper on my desk professing his infatuation with me. I was falling for him. And
I tried my hardest not to, because he didn’t even live in the same country.
Having never believed in long-distance relationships, I went
against my better judgment and embarked on what would soon become an endless
communiqué between Spain and England. Distance was built into our courtship
from the start. I slaved away in my office in Sevilla, while he scootered his
way through London. He visited every few weeks, but face-time was a luxury.
The relationship subsisted through phone calls, emails, and
text and instant messaging. In an instantaneous moment, the “we” of our
relationship was not limited to him and I. When things eventually (spoiler
alert!) got ugly, (spoiler alert!) our heated exchanges were all the more
heightened by the presence of IM and its nosy cohorts, like smug stenographers
all too pleased to translate and transfer the venom.
The totalitarian tendencies of technology presented constant
looming expectations, that ball-and-chain, catch-22 of convenience. Cell phones
and computers were always a lurking presence, weighty with the menacing
reminder, Your thoughts and feelings will be transmitted through us. You
have no excuse for not communicating, because you are obligingly connected, all
the time.
I began to enviously regard the droll predictability of the daily routines that most couples lamented. What I would have given for an unadulterated chat on the couch, our thoughts and words simply hanging in the air. Not needing to be digitized and pixellated to come into being. Our infrequent rendezvous felt desperate. The joy of simply sitting at a café table together was always undermined by the threat of our inevitable separation, when our utterances would revert to their electronic state.
Boyfriend (BF) was pretty deft at texting, and chided me for
taking so long to reply and for only using 30 characters when I had 140 at my
disposal. Mind you, this man was 35 years old. It was like having a
techno-happy teenager at my elbow, constantly bemoaning my lack of digital
finesse. BF peppered his messages with what I now recognize as insidious txt
language. U wud have been amazd to c it.
The first times he said he loved me was in the form of a
text message, and there was something about that that I just couldn’t take
seriously. Adults don’t express their emotions through a shorthand language
dominated by adolescents. Love was too big for that.
I had a hard time accepting luv, and all of its attendant
manifestations and conflicts, on a tiny phone held in my palm. Shakespeare may
have structured and reconciled the messy enormity of love within the confines
of sonnet form. But BF’s expectation of me to encapsulate my feelings through a
piece of Nokia-issued plastic was like being asked to share my innermost
desires through Morse code.
The collision of both of our intense personalities produced
spectacular sparks, but, like most powerful combinations, the potency soon
became a destructive force, crushing every bit of goodwill in its path. His
passionate personality gave way to an underlying layer of insecurity and
jealousy, which provoked a string of battles. Our fighting soon caught up with,
and then overtook, our initial bliss.
Our fights navigated through and across all forums: instant
messenger, email, text messages. Email and texting have a time-delay factor,
which led me to punch out a rage-fueled response that resulted in a scrap of
the original long-winded lament I’d intended. These limitations enraged me
further. I could not abide by my fights becoming Verizon’s commodity. They were
making five cents on every volley and comeback.
If you’ve never conducted a fight via txt msgs, try your
best to keep it that way. This relationship was my first experience with text
wars. They were the worst kind of fight, because the exchanges were bite-sized.
He would make some infuriating comment, and I, enraged, would have to respond.
In 140 characters or less. Or in multi-message, where you have too much to say
and the whole thing gets split up into smaller messages sent in succession to
the recipient. This results in a disorder and lack of continuity that the
recipient must remedy by reading the first message last. I couldn’t even depend
on linearity in my conflicts anymore.
Typing skills also present a problem. In one tender conversation, BF told me to fuck oof.
Then to fuck off.
Damn Messenger.
Instant messenger evokes the same kind of aversion that
Match.com does, for its role in the commodified systemization of compatibility.
I like my life organized: I keep an obsessive planner, I sort files and
clothing to establish a sense of order within the scheme of the universe that
leaves me panicked.
But love? Love isn’t meant for charts and graphs. I recoil at the thought of feeding my romantic stats into some number-crunching program so that a pasty, pudgy Econ flunky can direct me to my betrothed. I cling to the romantic within, the poor soul constantly on the verge of being drowned by the more powerful and vocal cynic who monopolizes my psyche.
I don’t want external applications of structure in my love
life. I hate the idea of subscribing to planned problem-solving sessions and
communication strategies, just as I hate those self-improvement books that
reduce life and the self to a few simple steps, a few “Rules.” Ugh. Messenger
is yet another instrument in the unfortunate technologification of love.
Messenger does have its benefits, I suppose. Because it is
basically a transcription of a romantic/emotional exchange, it is a
transcription of the relationship. Whenever I think of visiting a new therapist
and having to somehow encapsulate my existence and all of its attendant
problems and people within neat verbal explanations, Messenger could be quite
handy. If BF and I had ever made it to therapy, the lucky professional, with a
brief perusal, could have a solid record of our highs and lows, a nice overview
of our dysfunction, right there on paper. It’s like having a personal scribe
record every detailed exchange of emotion. Every cruel jab, every hyperbolic
declaration documented. Oh, the convenience.
The deal-breaker should have been that my BF wrote
everything as a text message, complete with “u,” “b4,” and other hideous
configurations. This included handwritten notes and cards, and I recoiled every
time I received one.
I’m even a grammar descriptivist, so I make lenient
concessions for language misuse and innovation. I’m a firm believer in the true
democracy of language, the power of the masses in language evolution. But I’d
rather continue my selective linguistic snobbery than wrap my mind around a
reality in which it is acceptable for adults to write this way. There is a
creepy juvenile reversion about it. I can’t take seriously “I luv u” written in
a card. The medium is the message, and the medium privileges convenience over
poetics.
The worst part was when I received a card from the BF, in
which he said, “U are special. I luv u 2….” Did I say this was a hand-written
card? As in, regular English forms would be called for? I’m sure he must have
known how to write in standard language, but I never saw it. He was
intelligent; not the most literary of the bunch, but I think he knew better.
Yet he always wrote this way.
In college, one of my linguistics professors explained that
anthropological studies in recent decades had been producing a growing body of
evidence for the complex communication systems of apes. Still, one of the
remaining distinctions within humans’ one percent of genetic difference remains
our ability to transmit messages from one physical setting to another. However,
as our reliance on these distant communications increases, I wonder about their
viability as a substitute for communication in its more basic, primal form.
The enterprise of modern technological communication relies
upon a sort of suspension of disbelief—a chosen denial and acceptance of the
virtual for the real. Virtual communication is just that—virtual. I would never
want to think that technology-aided communication could ever truly replace the
intimacy of the immediate.
Perhaps that is why I still harbor a sense of incompleteness
after BF and I broke up, fittingly and for the last time, over email. Maybe
it’s because tears are still organic and an aching heart can’t be digitized.
And even if we someday find a way to fully technologize emotion, I’ll still
take old-school love, in all its low-tech glory, any day.
