The Cellphone is Not Your Friend

Originally written October 19, 2009 at 2:15pm

"These things, you cannot resolve over the phone, you know that," The LSU Professor tells me over lunch. He ordered something small, and I had the balls to order the "Beached Whale" thinking somehow it wasn't going to be that large.

I nodd, looking at my huge meal, and feeling intimated by its mere presence.

"The cellphone is not your friend!" He parrots back to me a saying I once gave him in response to his troubles with Nichole. Good ol' Nichole. "But if you go over there, you will leave with more questions than the answers you got out of the trip."

"Yeah, and for the money I spent on booze and therapy, I could have flown last minute to Michigan, and sat down, had a fifteen minute talk, and it would have been a much more mature response instead of being drunk for a two weeks straight. At least then, I'd have a little piece of mind. You learn a lot when you look someone in the eye. Even if he slammed the door in my face, hey, that's a pretty strong answer, I think." Yeah, do the math on that. That's a lot of fucking GG.

"What are you going to do the next time you two get into a fight? Are you going to fly out again?" The LSU Professor reasonably argues. "Save those conversation when you guys see each other at the planned times you've made in advance."

"He brings it up!" I defend myself.

"I don't care. One of you needs to change this thing, and it has to be you because this is not healthy." He holds up his hands like blinders on a horse. "Just keep the conversations on track...Emails aren't your friends either," he adds just to make sure I remember.

Between my cellphone and my computer being ruled out as forms of communication, that only leaves doves (or is it pigeons?) and--

"You know what you should do? Write letters to each other, because it will take six days for it to get here, and by the time it arrives, you'll be pining for him. Problem solved."

Six days? Maybe immediate forms of communication are the death of relationships, because they are as confusing as they are compulsive. Men have often referred to their cellphones as "leashes."