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.
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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.
MauledByStaplers: whenever [redacted] is editing a feature and needs to add a new fact, he just wedges it in as a parenthetical instead of working it into the paragraph. LAZY!
SayWhatAgain: [redacted] wrote that mos def is "dynamic" in his recurring roll on ER. it's actually mekhi phifer. i shoulda let it slip thru. RACIST!
When I left that job to come work at Nerve, little changed. We'd still IM throughout the day, a nine-hour conversation whizzing through the bandwidth between midtown and Soho, keeping us connected even as we were physically apart. It got so that IMing began to feel as natural as face-to-face conversation, and our online relationship even developed its own tone, a goofy sort of dialect that, if you're an IM user, you might be familiar with.
MauledByStaplers: the gas man came this morning and the dog did her best to protect the home
SayWhatAgain: grr grrr grr
MauledByStaplers: the guy was like, please hold her collar
SayWhatAgain: grrrrrrrrrrrrr! wuff!
MauledByStaplers: i told him that she wanted to protect us from paying our bill
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."
Within days of this switch, I had a quiet meltdown at work, as I am wont to occasionally do. Reflexively, I clicked over to my list of IM contacts. There he was: shaded in gray, the word "Mobile" hanging from his screenname like a tail. My stomach sank. For the past three years, at the first hint of crisis, my response had always been the same: instant message MauledByStaplers for an impromptu therapy session. The tiniest things — a harsh rebuke from the boss, a nasty email from a friend — and like a laboratory rat, I'd ping the IM machine to receive instantaneous mental-health relief from the one person who could talk me down off a ledge.
Suddenly this person was gone, and I realized with horror that I'd be forced to navigate the landmines of my workday without backup at the ready. 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 in the most pathetic possible way.
Yes, my friends were online, but their attempts to assuage my panic attacks felt plastic and preoccupied. And most of them didn't want to maintain a continuous stream of daylong conversation. I entered a state of IM withdrawal. The free-flowing minutia of my day had no outlet for discussion. I felt pregnant with random notions, hack theories, scraps of trivia, gossip and anecdotes. I clicked over to my Buddy List every few minutes to see if MauledByStaplers was logged on; the few times he was, I couldn't bring myself to ping him — it felt stalkerish and, strangely, too intimate. What was he doing over there? It didn't matter. Our quirky keyboarded rapport was shot. Suddenly life felt too serious for ironic exclamation points and onomatopoeia.
Time passed. I was single. Dating was misery, and made all the worse by the lack of an IM partner to whom I could talk to about exactly how unbelievably fucking miserable it was. Sounds crazy, but for weeks after his screenname turned gray, I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to message him about how horrible the previous night's date had gone in that old familiar, silly, semi-tongue-in-cheek inflection.
SayWhatAgain: so he takes me to this party which is actually not a party, but five people in a gaudy apartment doing nothing, and they're all talking in british accents with total sincerity about which brand of gin is best. gin! it was like being in an episode of Mystery! but even more boring and without the fun cartoon at the beginning.
MauledByStaplers: Your message has been sent to my mobile communication device.
The alleged device to which the automated response referred was an enigma to me, and if it actually received the few IMs I sent to it, these receptions produced no fruit. My days became quiet. I was forced to deal with the turbulence in my life without digitally transmitted assistance. In short, I began to relearn how to shut up and work. My threshold for both panic and boredom slowly rose.
It's been two years since then. I've been dating someone new since last summer, and I recently mentioned to my friend Jesse that sometimes he and I go an entire twenty-four hours without speaking.
"You mean you don't IM?" she recoiled, as if I'd left him out in the rain.
We don't. In fact, I don't think he even has Instant Messenger. He doesn't have the kind of desk job that I have — the kind where you don't so much "check" your email as stare at it for hours and hours like an autistic child. He has no clever screenname with which I can associate him, and though I message with coworkers and friends, I don't have any uninterrupted twenty-four-hour conversation in my life anymore. Even though he's the person with whom I want to share all the mindless details of my day, he's not there at all times. Instead, he disappears and reappears from morning to evening with lunar regularity.
At first I didn't like it. At work, I'd think of something I wanted to tell him, then realize it would have to wait until later. Even emailing didn't work — he'd take hours to respond. Eventually I came to terms with the fact that whatever ridiculous ideas or narratives were rooting around in my brain, I was just going to have to wait until nighttime to pour them all onto him.
Turns out, I like this way better. It gives me time to filter and organize. Here's what I do: I take all the inanity in my head, and I make a nice little smorgasbord. Like any good smorgasbord, it's served all at once, a mˇlange of many different textures — of worries and stories and crackpot hypotheses — both sweet and savory. I arrange everything on an attractive-looking platter, and when I finally see him at night, my smorgasbord is ready to serve, as is his. Had we dished them out piecemeal, they just wouldn't have tasted the same.
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