By Victor Greto
Reading and writing are intimate by nature.
And ever since e-mail became commercially public in 1989, that potential intimacy has grown exponentially.
Think about how you’re reading this sentence. Somewhere in your mind, these words echo, from your eye to your inner ear to your heart.
If I wrote in an e-mail that I love you, regardless of how well you knew me, you’d have time to read those three little words over and over, with that eye-ear-mind echo resonant through your body.
And perhaps you’d actually start to believe me, or wonder at my motives, or think: how sweet.
Maybe I really mean it, and maybe I don’t. But I wrote it, and it’s there for you to see and think about when you’re alone.
Meanwhile, I’m safely at home, staring at a screen, perhaps anxiously awaiting a reply, or just feeling good about saying those words, or enjoying the idea that I put you on the spot. Or I write that to every woman I know just to see what they write in return, playing the odds.
It all can take place in a matter of minutes.
Isn’t e-mail wonderful? And just plain scary?
It’s fast, intimate and potentially profound. It also can be deceptive, self-absorbing and potentially catastrophic.
E-mail has become a rapid-fire way to cultivate relationships. Where only 10 years ago we may have been impatiently waiting for the post office to deliver a letter, today we’re wondering why they’ve even bothered to tell us they’re raising the first-class rate to 37 cents.
According to a February report by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration, 84 percent of all Internet users use e-mail, more than any other use. That’s nearly half of the American population as a whole.
“E-mail alters the way people make contact because it allows you to create illusions along the dimensions of time and space,” says Marlene Maheu, a licensed psychologist in San Diego who specializes in e-mail relationships. “It’s the first technology that when you’re engaged in it, you get the sense that you’re in a separate place together.”
There are no “social-visual cues that would normally help you pace yourself depending on your recipients’ actions,” Maheu says. “You don’t see the person blushing. If you got those responses across the lunch table you would stop.”
Most of us would, anyway. But with e-mail, you can sit back and think about your response. Or, you may have a stash of already-penned paragraphs that just so happen to speak to this very issue. You cut and paste, and there it is: intimacy on the fly.
But don’t blame the technology that made this wonder possible.
“A lot of people ask if it’s good or healthy, but it’s like a hammer,” Maheu says. “It’s what you do with it. It’s the human being using the hammer that has the ability to do good or bad.”
When the “I love you” virus infected thousands of computers in the spring of 2000, many commentators suggested it spread as fast as it did because people couldn’t resist opening a piece of mail headed by those three little words.
Viruses, however, are just one of the abuses of e-mail.
What also has exponentially grown are reports of active pedophiles, pathological liars and unsolicited mail from advertisers and people from whom you’d just rather not hear.
There is a flip side, of course.
E-mail is a professionally efficient communication tool, at work and at home. We can attach files and pictures and music to our letters. We can communicate with people all over the country and all over the world.
We can even write to relatives who, for whatever reason, we’ve deemed not worth a 10-cent-a-minute phone call.
You can send e-card greetings on birthdays, holidays and just to say hi. And it’s all free.
And then there are those who actually do find love, no matter how short-lived.
Suzi Kay said that when she divorced a decade ago, she tried a dating service.
“My big brother persuaded me to do it,” she said, but the men she was introduced to “couldn’t have gotten a date on their own.”
There was one pediatrician who just wanted to have phone sex. Another exposed himself to her on their first date.
Zoning out in front of the tube sounded pretty good after that.
Which is basically what she did until about five years ago, when her two children convinced her to post information about herself on an AOL site specifically for people looking for a relationship.
In a short time, she received replies from 1,000 men, many of whom she e-mailed back and forth several times.
Of those, she said, she met 30 face to face.
How Kay, 51, decided who to meet is at the heart of e-mail intimacy.
“I think I’m a good judge of character by writing to people,” Kay said. “It’s a comfort level that you can’t pinpoint: the way he writes, the style he writes. If you want to go through quantity — a lot of people in the shortest amount of time — the Internet is the way to do it, if you use caution and are careful.”
The power of e-mail anonymity is unique, said William Dorfman, a professor of psychology at Nova Southeastern University in Davie.
“The anonymity of getting to know someone without ever having to risk an evaluation physically or personally, just by what you write, allows people to move into a relationship they couldn’t do if they were meeting face to face,” he said.
The potential problem occurs when anonymous relationships become a person’s only relationships, he said.
All healthy relationships lead to face-to-face encounters. “The most satisfying contact is human contact,” he said.
Kay would agree.
She wrote a man for two months before she met him, on Valentine’s Day, 1998.
She chose him because of how he wrote, how those words resonated.
“He had a great sense of humor,” she said. “He didn’t show signs of a temper. And we bantered back and forth, and I love a guy who has a sense of humor.”
They sent each other five or six e-mails a night. “Some of them were pages long,” Kay said. “The comfort level is great when you’re hiding behind that mask of anonymity, and you can fully express how you feel without fear.”
She fell in love with him.
What Kay experienced is common news to many professionals who study e-mail intimacy.
Andrea Baker, a Kent State sociologist who has studied nearly 100 couples who developed online relationships, also sees e-mail relationships positively.
“It increases communication between people who already know each other,” she said, “and for people who meet for the first time online, it speeds up the process of getting to know each other — at least what their beliefs, philosophies, lifestyle and feelings are.”
Because there are no face-to-face cues, at least at first, it’s nonjudgmental, and the person receiving the e-mail is concerned only with the content of the message, she said.
“Age and appearance are minimized, so people tend to be less judgmental,” she said. “I recommend a lengthy communication with people, because certain things come out over time that don’t come out right away.”
Kay didn’t know it, but time was the one thing she didn’t have.
Her love affair ended shortly after it began. The man whom she met via e-mail, who entered her mind and her heart by filling message after message with humor and love, died from lung cancer only a little more than a year after they met.
She has not met — or e-mailed — anyone like him since.
But she still has a notebook full of his e-mails.