To end a romance, just press 'send' Instant messaging altering the way we love
By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff | April 22, 2007
It was the middle of a workday two weeks ago, and Larry was deep into a meeting when a text-message began scrolling across his cellphone screen. He glanced at it and thought: "You can't be serious."
It was no joke. His girlfriend was breaking up with him ... again. And she was doing it by e-mail ... again.
For the sixth time in eight months, she had ended their relationship electronically rather than face-to-face. He had sensed trouble -- he had been opening his e-mail with trepidation for weeks -- so the previous day he had suggested that they meet in person to talk things over. But she nixed that, instead choosing to send the latest in what Larry had begun to consider part of a virtual genre: "the goodbye e-mail."
Understandably, he'd like to say his own goodbye to that genre. "E-mail is horrible," says Larry, 36, an Air Force sergeant from New Hampshire who asked that his last name not be used. "You just get to the point where you hate it. You can't have dialogue. You don't have that person in front of you. You just have that black-and-white text. It's a very cold way of communicating."
Cold, maybe. Popular, for sure. The use of e-mail and instant-messaging to end intimate relationships is gaining popularity because instantaneous communication makes it easy -- some say too easy -- to just call the whole thing off. Want to avoid one of those squirmy, awkward breakup scenes? Want to control the dialogue while removing facial expressions, vocal inflections, and body language from the equation? A solution is as near as your keyboard or cellphone.