After three years of sharing a bed, a home and a dog, we broke up through a channel that was nearly as integral a part of our relationship as any of those things: AOL Instant Messenger.
It was a difficult breakup. There was a lot of regrettable ALL-CAPS PROFANITY spewed from both parties. There was *sighing*. There was crying and typing at the same time, though we never resorted to crying emoticons. There were accusations inwhat waas claerly rushd typing as each of us raced to get the last word.
There were long pauses as we each glared solemnly at our monitors, hoping the other would put the brakes on this eighty-words-per-minute psychodrama.
There are people out there right now rolling their eyes. I understand. But to us, breaking up over IM made a certain amount of sense — as two people with desk jobs that required long hours, a good chunk of our couplehood had resided in the realm of instant messaging. We lived together in a tiny East Village one-bedroom, but in some ways our IM relationship was just as intimate a setting. For a while, we worked at the same magazine, and our routine went something like this: we'd get up, ride the train to work together, go to our respective desks, power up our computers and instant message each other from across the office: "Hi!" From there, we'd IM all day long — clever observations, office gossip, occasional filth — then shut down for the night and meet by the elevator moments later, picking up where we'd left off.
In the magazine's masthead, he was inches from the top, while I was flush with the bottom. He'd send me dispatches about what was going on in the vaunted editors' wing of the office. I'd respond with self-deprecating reports from the factcheckers' dreary, windowless cubicle field, letting him in on the only privileged information I had access to: which writers were the most factually inaccurate.
This off-kilter tenor provided a modicum of distance, which made our eventual IM-facilitated split a little bit easier. It felt as if it wasn't quite happening in real-time, like we were simply reading the transcripts of our breakup online. Eventually, the grueling process of "breaking up" gave way to the rather static state of "broken up." We stopped IMing, and his screenname sprouted an addendum in pale gray script that read "Mobile."
Suddenly this person was gone, and I realized with horror that I'd be forced to navigate the landmines of my workday without backup. I'd been made soft by my IM relationship; my ability to push back against life had atrophied. To use a repellent word from the self-help books, I'd become co-dependent.
