Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message

I got my first cell phone in 2006 when I finally came home from Peace Corps. One of my old college friends replied to the group mail I sent out with my new number exclaiming that hell must have frozen over. I love talking on the phone for long meandering wrinkles of time. I hate being the first one to say goodbye, especially with people I care about. Two nights ago I spent two hours and twenty-four minutes on the phone with my friend C. Over the summer I fell asleep with my phone open, resting on the pillow next to my ear so it would feel like the woman on the other end wasn't so far away.

Talking on the phone is patently confessional. There are no physical distractions to lure your eye. I find myself fixating on the physical appearance just as much as I focus on words when talking to someone face-to-face. On the phone, I don't have to stare at the budding pimple just to the left of the ear lobe, or wonder if I'm making too much eye contact, then snap to halfway through a sentence and try and play catch up.

Over the phone, all that extra energy can be focused on the voice, the timbre, the inflection, the stumbles, the spastic I-don't-know's that serve as the connective tissue between unwilling sentences. When I was fourteen I spent a night prank calling random numbers with my friend J. The last number I called, which formed the pattern of a right triangle on the number pad of my parent's phone, went through to the house of a girl I'd never met before. I heard a rounded and curious young voice answer and the joke I was about to tell suddenly seemed completely beside the point. I said the only other thing I could come up with. "Hi."

We spent an hour on the phone that night, revealing little tidbits about each other in calculated increments. I can't remember what we talked about in specific, but I know it wound up being something religiously-oriented (she went to a Christian high school, as it turned out). In the same way that something in her voice had subverted my faux-cocky bravura, there was something in her way of thinking, both deliberate and vulnerable, that drew me in. This was S, the first woman I ever fell in love with.

We spoke four or five times a week for more than two years. She would call me from the bathtub, soaking her sore muscles after color guard practice; we'd watch Melrose Place together over the phone; we'd shut out the lights and crawl into bed together, each in our own room, our words comfortably meandering past each other. We would talk for two and three hours at a time. I only saw her in person twice over those two years. We went on a date once (she had to drive because I didn't have a car), and I snuck onto the campus of her school to share lunch one day. That's it. When I was sixteen she graduated from high school and moved away. I never spoke to her again.

 


Now that I have a cell phone, I send text messages like an amphetamized chimpanzee. Aside from functional convenience, it's so alluring to know that I can send someone any little message I want and touch their day almost instantly. When I was still living in LA I broke up with a woman I had been seeing for four months over text.

We met at a friend's birthday party. She had bleached blonde hair with a pink streak in it that seemed out of place with her business-chic cloths and stalky frame. I was immediately attracted to her. We talked for a while, then I walked her to her car when she had to leave. She gave me her business card and a quick peck. We went out for real a week later. After a late dinner I walked her back to her car again, and we kissed for three hours steaming up the windows like it was prom night. We stayed at it until 2AM and I remember some creaky old neighborhood watch patrol man knocking on the window to make sure things were okay. "Yeah, we're doing great. Thanks."

She was a TV executive, a few years older than me, and had a busy schedule. I was working two jobs and trying to raise financing for a movie in my spare time. We still managed to see each other once a week. She used to tease me about how stoic I was. "You're my little science experiment," she would say to me. She had never dated a man as aloof as I was. When I come across as aloof with women, it usually means I don't trust them or fear them in some way.

We spent a very comfortable few months together with no pressure to discuss where things were going. Neither of us pressed to have a conversation to label what we were doing together. I liked her. I genuinely admired her. But there was something ridiculous about her. She made a lot of money and would freely use it to do things like hire a nutritionist to tell her what kinds of almonds to eat. I don't find that objectionable in the least, but I knew that her way of living wouldn't ever be a way that I wanted to live.

Love is inevitable, at least for me. Not necessarily falling in love with people, but I can't help loving almost anyone I've known after sharing some amount of time together. It's like I have love autism. After a few months, I started to feel it happening with her. I wasn't falling in love, but my lazy affection was solidifying into something L-shaped. This made me deeply uncomfortable. I didn't want to love someone older than me, who spoke about the difference in four star hotels in Berlin versus London, who paid someone to tell her what to eat.

I realized I had to stop seeing her. I didn't want to care for her any more than I already did. I didn't want to share the semantics and practicalities of her life in a way that inevitable love would make necessary (for me at least). So I started avoiding her calls. After a week of trading voice mails and some too-convenient scheduling conflicts she left for a business trip. When she came back I was canvassing a film market trying to convince toothy Canadian investors to give me half a million dollars to make a movie. She sent me a few texts over the first couple days of the market. I sent flat, minimalist replies.

The third day of the market, all my meetings were over and nobody had been impressed with my pitch. I sat in a puffy armchair in the lobby of a Santa Monica hotel sipping coffee from a paper cup, thinking about work, salesmanship, convincing people to give you things. I got a text from her asking me if I wanted to meet for a drink later. I mashed my toes into the bottom of my shoes. "No," I thought to myself. I still have work to do.

I wrote her back that I couldn't, I had to go home and write instead. "I see. Well then, write well."

 

Previous Posts:

Date Night: The F U Date 

Sex Machine: Shave My Bush 

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating 

Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble 

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy 

Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't 

Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy 

Sex Machine: My First STD 

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV 

Love Machine: Let's Make Babies 

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines 

Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner 

Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office 

Hooksexup Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much 

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop 

Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do 

Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants 

Date Machine: Rate My Ethics 

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met 

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed 

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed 

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night 

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass