October 30, 2002

DEAR ANDREA: Me and my girlfriend have been dating for over five months, long distance. I love her with all my heart and soul! We call each other every day and it's getting expensive. Every once in a while she decides that it's too expensive but always decides to get back together because she says that she loves me. We talked about getting married and having kids and everything. I want to spend the rest of my life with her but she keeps deciding that we should break up. I'm getting the feeling that this isn't the reason that she wants to break up. She is always talking to other guys in chat and on MSN Messenger. A lot of these guys call her all the time too. I know that she must love me because she is spending so much money to talk to me and we have so much fun when we are together. I'm just getting tired of her always changing her mind about us and I'm getting worried about all these guys she's talking to all the time. She did kind of cheat on me with one of them a little while ago. She swears that they didn't have sex but that they were cuddling and that they are only friends and will never be anything more than that. I just don't know what to do! I love her so much and I want to marry her and have a family with her. She says she wants the same thing but she's always talking about breaking up and then there's all these guys she's always talking to. What should I do?

Love, Hanging on the Telephone

Dear Hanging:

Sometimes I wonder if you people are making my job so easy on purpose. Are you afraid I'll wear out my pretty little head tackling problems that actually require some brainpower?

Honestly, what could I – what could anyone – possibly say to you besides, "Wake up, lad! Don't be such a nebbish! When you get hurt (and you will), you'll have nobody to blame but yourself." Harsh, I know, but it's painful to see you standing there with a hangdog expression on your face as the 16-ton weight of fate plummets toward your head. Couldn't you at least try to get out of the way?

A few sentences into your letter, I immediately seized on instant messaging as the answer to your problem – why waste money on long-distance calls when you can chat with your sweetie all day long for a low monthly fee? Then I read on, and there she was, your girlfriend, messaging merrily away with every dude in possession of a modem and a rudimentary grasp of the language. So obviously, lack of awareness of the available technology is not the problem here.

Have a seat. I'm going to tell you what really happened. You two conceived a mutual infatuation (it means "to make foolish") and established a long-distance telephone habit. This in turn fostered the sort of intoxicating pseudo-intimacy so common between phone pals, chat room denizens, I.M.-ers, and – once upon a time – regular old correspondents who had to buy stamps. Of course you talked about getting married and having babies – you might have barely met, but you had that headlong, head-over-heels thing going. "Nobody has ever experienced such a love as ours!" It's very powerful stuff, and most people have been sucked in by it once or twice. And then they got over it.

Sadly, while you pined away at home dreaming of love, marriage, and baby carriage, she continued to be what she'd always been, a flirty young woman who enjoys male attention. This is a fine thing in itself, but perhaps not the best indicator that she's looking to settle down just now. She realized long ago that this wasn't going to work. She's too young to get married, she doesn't know for a fact that you're the one, she's having too much fun ... probably all of these are true, plus some I haven't thought of. She does like you – she probably even loves you – but she wants out. She tried to let you down easy with the thing about the phone bills, but you wouldn't let her. So she waited a while – she didn't want to hurt you – and tried again. And you wouldn't let her. Please let her. It'll suck for now, but you'll thank me later.