The unprovoked e-mail from an ex — or its somewhat less intrusive social media counterparts, the unprovoked Twitter follow and the unprovoked (and likely accidental) LinkedIn network request — occupies a uniquely terrifying position in the lifecycle of a relationship.
As someone chronically unable to remain friends with former significant others, this isn’t an experience entirely alien to me. For example, 45 minutes after midnight on my last birthday, I received the following text message from David, my high school (and freshman year of college, and sophomore year of college) ex:
Being well-versed in decoding quizzical text messages from estranged exes, it was no particular challenge to translate two exploding cornucopias, a wrapped gift, and a cake to:
“Happy birthday! Even though we haven’t spoken since you skipped my housewarming party [in Queens, where the one item on the drink menu was 'Trash can punch served in an actual trash can — good luck!'] your birthday is still a recurring event in my Google Calendar, and I can’t figure out how to delete it.”
When everyone plays by the rules and sends incomprehensible text messages, the occasional missive from an ex is emotional white noise.
The lengthy e-mail from an ex is entirely another story.
“Hi Yoel,” began an e-mail from Chris (the most recent of the exes), asking to see me during a visit to New York from Berkeley. He continued:
I gave a lot of thought to whether I should write, because I see you’re nicely settled now, and I don’t want to reopen old wounds. I decided in the end that it was worth getting in touch, but of course I will understand if you can’t see me, or even if you don’t want to reply.
At some length, I got an excursus on his various comings and goings since we last spoke, as well as an apology for the hurtful manner in which he ended our relationship in June of 2010. He told me about his relief to be going back to the UK. He asked how I was doing.
And herein, the usual rules of polite conversation cease to apply. As happened while I was drafting part of this post, being asked how you’re doing by a bartender is totally innocent. Being asked how you’re doing by an ex is confrontational and unsettling. Where do you even begin to pick up the pieces? It seems somehow inadequate or insensitive to reply candidly with something like, ”Hi Chris — I’m living with my boyfriend now, we bought a stand mixer together, and I’m rewatching season 1 of 30 Rock. Hope all’s well with you!”
In the end, I settled on a pretty tame account of my recent schoolwork and what I felt was a fairly generous invitation to maintain an open channel of communication. To which I received… nothing. Which, a year ago, would have been crushing; but, as the logic of relationships goes, it’s all water under the bridge at this point.
Because the essential truth of the Estranged Ex E-mail is that, with nothing tying you together, there’s no reason to expect a particularly heartfelt or substantial conversation. At its core, this is the same problem I see with most forms of online dating: without preexisting emotional investment, the effort required to be civil to someone else often exceeds the benefit you derive from it. Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, talks about mutual love as the grounding force of online cooperation; you contribute to Wikipedia without realizing immediate personal gain because you feel an emotional connection to your project that goes beyond economic rationality. So, too, with interpersonal communication, only we still naively believe that the act of initiating conversation with someone automatically includes sufficient emotional investment to continue that conversation when the easy preliminaries are over.
At the end of the day, I don’t begrudge Chris for failing to reply to my e-mail any more than I begrudge myself for failing to post on this blog for almost a year (or, for that matter, for failing to finish writing this post when I first drafted it in mid-December). In all likelihood, this blog would have continued to lie dormant for another year had I not received e-mail this morning informing me that someone on Thingbox rediscovered my post about the site from ages ago, and that my various electronic comings and goings are presently being mocked by that forum’s sundry participants (of which, to bring things full circle, Chris is probably one). It took a concrete reminder of the fact that even as this blog has been in my past for a year now, it’s still very much in the present for some people, to get me to start writing again. Inaction was my default, until a bunch of snarky forum posters lit the fire under my ass to (a) Google myself and see what they could possibly be reading about me, (b) transfer this domain name from GoDaddy, and (c) resurrect the emotional tie I once had to posting on this website. We’ll see how long that tie lasts this time.

