My ex-boyfriend, Joel, was a friend of a friend. We started emailing within a couple of days of meeting. By week two, I found myself shamelessly smitten with digital Joel. His Facebook page was impressive; his emails, well-crafted (a perfect combination of short and sweet); and his gchatting persona was witty, attentive, and generous with the emoticons.

With so much build-up, our eventual real-life first date — nearly a month after our initial gchat exchange — was Hooksexup-wracking and fraught with expectation. I felt like I was going on a date with my favorite television-show character: Joel the Incredible!, my unbelievably clever, kindhearted, and constantly ROFLing beau-to-be.

As you might have guessed, the date was kind of awkward. We got into a fight about feminism and Erotic Photohunt. There were more than a few stretches of uncomfortable silence and clock-watching. But despite the tension, things ended up okay — fun, even — and we continued seeing each other for several months. From that point on, though, our digital interactions were never the same. Our charming, flirtatious online selves grew weary, burnt out. Our chatting repartee turned banal and perfunctory, and sweet, thoughtful emails sent "just because" began appearing less and less frequently in my inbox.

A couple of months in, our once-playful avatars had become irritable, pugnacious, and incapable of civil discourse. Our online interactions became so antagonistic that we agreed to quit gchatting with each other altogether. We eventually defriended each other, too, and stopped following one another on Twitter. I told my best friend Liz about the pact, and it puzzled her. "How can you not have your boyfriend on your buddy list? What's the big deal? It's just chat!" It was "just chat," but that wasn't the big deal. The big deal, I wanted to scream at her, was that Joel the Incredible was dead — and there was no bringing him back.

5. Inbox Sulking

The inbox is a dangerous place for the broken-hearted. It's a minefield of memories, mistakes, and regrets long forgotten, yet still wildly combustible. During the final phase of my relationship with Joel, I spent a lot of time in my inbox. Our relationship had grown complicated, and I thought Gmail might clear things up. I typed "Joel + love" in the search box, and ruminated over a few choice picks from the hundred-plus threads returned.

My relationship was on its last legs, but I was in denial. I looked to my inbox to support my delusion, sifting through hundreds of love letters, "I miss you" cards, cutesy Photoshop jobs, emoticon-filled chats, e-tickets for two — all evidence, I thought, of a love and relationship worth saving. Could all this have been for naught?

But I knew digging deeper would uncover the other side of our relationship. A more targeted search turned up signs of love turned sour: combative IMs, longwinded e-indictments, hasty rebuttals, and half-hearted apologies. Incidentally, the terms "Joel + sad" turned up about the same number of results as "Joel + love."

I brooded over these digital remnants, trying to cobble them together into one coherent picture — some sort of proof that our love was either true or false. But after weeks of scavenging, all I could see was a graveyard of sentiments. No amount of revisiting our digital history could change the inexpressibly complicated reality. And when I finally took inventory of all that wasn't fit to print, I realized I had been rummaging for clues that were with me all along. Gmail didn't save my relationship with Joel because it never could've. The missing pieces of the puzzle were in my memory, not my inbox.  n°