I was unsure whether to put this in GD, GQ or here. But since I’m sticking with my story of this being a purely hypothetical situation, I’ll put it in MPSIMS.
Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that you’re a girl (which may not be too big of a stretch for some of the actual girls out there.) You meet a boy. Being the type of girl that you are, you need lots of advise about this boy from objective strangers. So you post about this boy on multiple occasions. Here, Here and Here.
Then that boy moves away (which was expected) and never calls or writes you. Moreover, he never responds to the 3 emails you send him throughout a 6 month period. This strikes you as strange, as he may have had a number of faults, but you’d assume that he’d at least take the courtesy to reply to an email. Especially the last one, which basically said “I don’t understand this silence. Are we cool? And if not, why?” In none of the letters did you refer to the two of you as a couple, or use the word relationship once. Even while you were together, you were very careful to NOT get clingy, because he was, after all, leaving soon. He left in September. You knew he had plans to come home for Christmas. When he didn’t contact you at that time (and you know he WAS home, mutual friends ran into him) you took it really personally. You began to question everything you had done, and ended up completely frustrated and confused.
Now let’s imagine that you’re just the type of girl to pick at a scab. You pull hangnails. When you bite your lip, you’ll inevitably end up worrying the wound. It’s just who you are, you’re not terribly good at ignoring the things that bother you. And in the act of ignoring you, this boy has created the mother of all hangnails. In the words of the new Pretender’s song: “I’ll do anything to make you adore me, or deplore me but never ignore me.”
After the last third email went unresponded, you decide to let it go. You decide that there are only one of two reasons for him to NOT respond to the email: he either never got the emails because you got his email address wrong, or he lacks a soul.
Now let’s say that you discover Addresses.com which has an email verification thing. While playing with that, it occurs to you to try his name. This leads to another search page, which gives you his current address. You know it’s his, because it has his middle initial, his name (which isn’t terribly common) and is in the smallish suburb that his college is in.
Now, in this hypothetical situation, would it be insane-psychogirlish to write him a snail mail saying something like “I don’t know if I got your email right, since I never got a response. If you did get my letters, and you just didn’t write back, sorry for snailing you, but I’d really like to know what it is that happened, or what I did to make you end our friendship in this way.” Ie: At what point is utilizing web resources OK and when is it cyber-stalking? And when is asking to get smacked down just another form of self abuse?
Of course, I ask these questions of the Teeming Millions not out of self interest, but out of intellectual curiosity. What say ye?
