Inbox
Over the last few days I've spent several hours (and there are more to come) organizing, filing, and purging my email inbox.
It's painstaking, because there are all kinds of attachments and photos and valuable letters worth keeping, so I need to look at most things before they are deleted.
And here's the thing: I can see an entire relationship run its course simply through emails. In the start, they're kind, friendly, helpful, and generally written with a sense of reaching out one's hands out to the other. As time passes, the emails become more practical, simply setting plans and occasionally bickering. Soon, we started to pick little fights and respond passive-aggressively. Eventually, the writings are consumed by issues and problems and over-reactions to words and events that, at the beginning, would have been utterly forgettable. Finally, there are the post-breakup emails, where both parties try to make some sort of amends, in the "we were both wrong, so it's all mostly a wash" style of diplomacy.
I suppose the lesson is one of learning patience, one of seeing the problems of the future that nearly all couples face, and learning to handle those problems in a way that either leads to their solution, or as clean a break-up as can be had. Many relationship problems, I believe, are only magnified by the fact that after six months or a year, both people are running out of new things to say to each other; each person knows and possibly despises the little weaknesses and idiosyncrasies that the other person displays. And often we (I, anyway) intentionally magnify problems in order to 'win' the emotional battle of the day.
There is also a lesson of self-awareness. If you've got those emails still, look back on the fights you had with your ex, just once, and see how simple the solutions to most of them are just my removing the momentary emotional heat from the context. On the opposite side of this truism is the fact that sex never seems as good in hindsight (even just a minute or two into hindsight) as it did in the moment. If only we could find a way to indulge the positive emotions endlessly, while preventing the negative emotions from clouding our best judgement.
It's painstaking, because there are all kinds of attachments and photos and valuable letters worth keeping, so I need to look at most things before they are deleted.
And here's the thing: I can see an entire relationship run its course simply through emails. In the start, they're kind, friendly, helpful, and generally written with a sense of reaching out one's hands out to the other. As time passes, the emails become more practical, simply setting plans and occasionally bickering. Soon, we started to pick little fights and respond passive-aggressively. Eventually, the writings are consumed by issues and problems and over-reactions to words and events that, at the beginning, would have been utterly forgettable. Finally, there are the post-breakup emails, where both parties try to make some sort of amends, in the "we were both wrong, so it's all mostly a wash" style of diplomacy.
I suppose the lesson is one of learning patience, one of seeing the problems of the future that nearly all couples face, and learning to handle those problems in a way that either leads to their solution, or as clean a break-up as can be had. Many relationship problems, I believe, are only magnified by the fact that after six months or a year, both people are running out of new things to say to each other; each person knows and possibly despises the little weaknesses and idiosyncrasies that the other person displays. And often we (I, anyway) intentionally magnify problems in order to 'win' the emotional battle of the day.
There is also a lesson of self-awareness. If you've got those emails still, look back on the fights you had with your ex, just once, and see how simple the solutions to most of them are just my removing the momentary emotional heat from the context. On the opposite side of this truism is the fact that sex never seems as good in hindsight (even just a minute or two into hindsight) as it did in the moment. If only we could find a way to indulge the positive emotions endlessly, while preventing the negative emotions from clouding our best judgement.
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