The girl in my inbox
Published on 2025-02-14
I want to tell you a story about telling a story.
The story within a story went something like this: many years ago, I was dating this girl. I'm using the word "dating" a little liberally, but you'll understand why. She was ostensibly my first girlfriend. We would have met at some point back in middle school, and the year before I moved on to high school we got together (to the extent to which middle school students can be said to "be together," but we'll get to that).
I would have told one of her friends that I had a crush on her, who, of course, immediately turned around and told the girl herself. It was sort of a picturesque young-love story: we stayed together for a year, which is like a century when you're twelve; we had lockers right beside one another, we were in all the same classes and spent a lot of time with one another.
There's just one weird detail about this story: our entire relationship existed over email.
We'd see each other every morning, but we'd awkwardly avoid eye-contact, not talking to each other. The closest we ever came to talking to one another in person was when we were hanging out with the friends we had in common, when we'd kind of sort of talk to each other through others. After school, however, when I'd go home and my iPod connected to the WiFi, I'd hear a little ding noise that'd tell me I'd received an email. She was one of my "favourited" contacts on the iOS mail app, so she got a special notification sound I didn't hear for anyone else. We had an email thread thousands of emails long, chock full of the garbage your default mail app puts in your emails, templated signatures, colourful email thread quotations, and so on. We'd often have a few different conversations going on at the same time, each consigned to their own paragraph; we'd talk about history, life, culture, politics, all kinds of nerd stuff. All in all, we had a great relationship.
It's just that when we'd come to school the following day, we'd say nothing.
I tried asking her out on dates a few times, largely in response to pressure from other people in my life, and she'd always say no. She seemed content with the way things were.
After we finished middle school, the emails started getting more sparse. I was also feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that our relationship didn't seem to be "going anywhere," consigned permanently to the computer and the internet. One day, about a week before I started my junior year of high school, I sent her an email, wanting to know definitively where we stood. By that point, it seemed like she was ready for the relationship to be over, so over it was.
I saw her a number of times over the next few years—we were both in the same program at high school—but we never spoke again, online or in person.
That's the story of the girl in my inbox, but that's not the story I wanted to share today.
The story of the story is that for years I told people about my first relationship as a sort of self-deprecating gag about social anxiety. And for what it's worth, I do think the story has a lot to say about my experience as a kid in the public school system, how I experienced relationships as a child, and if I'm being honest it does still have some bearing on my relationships today—it's not exactly a secret I deal with social anxiety.
One night, my current partner and I were talking about our relationship histories and I brought up my email girlfriend from back in middle school. Just as I was starting to punch down on myself, she asked:
Do you think your relationship with her was any less valuable just because it happened over email?
And I don't think I ever thought about it that way before.
I don't really tell the story about the email girl anymore—at least, not the way I used to. Sometimes I wish I'd taken a step back and appreciated what I had at the time, but we're talking about something that happened on the order of a decade ago. There's not much use in regretting it now. If anything, it's given me a lot to think about with respect to the relationships I have in life today—a greater willingness to let things be the way they are, to enjoy things for what they are.
Thanks email girl.
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