Every now and then I find myself in a long email chain with a friend or someone, where I’ll send a long, thoughtful email every few days, and they’ll reply with a long, thoughtful email, and although I enjoy conversations, at some point it has to come to an end and I wouldn’t want the chain to reach 50, 100, 200 emails, and I don’t think the other person would like it either.
What’s a nice and graceful way to say “I think this is a good time to stop emailing further?” I wouldn’t want to just go AWOL, but every time either of us goes 4 days or longer without replying, we feel like we’re the rude one.
This works better if you arrange for someone else to send an email relating how you were hit by an omnibus.
Anyway, I am not Emily Post, but e-mail is not real-time communication and one is not obligated to send messages when one does not feel like it. It is OK if you write once every 4 weeks or 4 months; there is no “4 days” rule.
Send a short reply acknowledging their last, being agreeable but raising no further issues or questions. Say nothing that invites them to expand upon what they have said. Say nothing to which they will feel they must respond. Obviously I don’t know anything about your conversation but (in extremely brief terms):
[Their last email:] Blah blah about life. Blah blah about what they’ve been doing.
[Your reply:] Yeah definitely I agree. That’s great to hear what you’ve been doing.
If you want to let them down more gently, do it gradually eg make your replies shorter and shorter and less and less provocative of a response.
Maybe increase the gap until they get the hint. Example: Wait 5 days before replying. Wait 6 days before replying. Wait 7 days before replying. And shorten the note each time too. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually they will either get the hint, or respond with, “Hey! I haven’t heard from you in a while!” And that’s your cue to say, “Not really all that much happening here.”
How certain are you of your assumptions about the thoughts/feelings of the other? You write “I don’t think the other person would like it either”, but then you write “we feel like we’re the rude one”.
And why don’t you want the chain to reach 50, 100 etc? If it’s because you run out of things to write long, thoughtful emails about I suggest following @Princhester’s suggestion if that’s not how things just go naturally.
If it’s because you feel it is taking up too much time to write the kind of email you want to write, try being honest about that. “I’ve been spending a bit too much time on these emails, so I’ll be slower to respond/call this conversation as complete. Happy to / Maybe we’ll take it up again sometime.”
Or just “I don’t have time to give this a proper reply right now. Am doing well right now. Hope you are too.”
Though this reminds me a bit of a thing that was going round my facebook recently about Guessers and Askers. I.e. people who try to never ask a question unless they know the answer to be affirmative, to avoid embarrassment on both sides, and people who just ask and are comfortable with both saying “no” and receiving a “no”.
I have plenty of email chains just peter out. There’s rarely any formal “kthxbye” at the end of them. I’m not aware of them being expected. When a new thought comes up to that friend, I start a new thread.
This one, too. If somebody writes me a long email that is not time sensitive but I need some time to get to, I send an email like this. And vice versa. And I have no expectation of a time frame for the response. It may be days, weeks, or even a month or more sometimes as people get entangled in their lives. It’s no big deal and I don’t take offense when it happens to me and I hope others don’t take offense when I take my sweet time. It’s email.
I’ve had a on-going email exchange with another woman for well over two decades. We have a couple core subjects that created the initial exchange, and we still share those interests.
Beyond that, she is super chatty, seems to have a life full of events happening (especially to her children and now grandchildren). and unending energy to communicate. I, well, aren’t any of those things. Especially the no children, no grands to talk about, no need to share detailed info on what is or is not doing well in my gardens or home decoration projects, and ‘new activities’ I’ve taken up, because I mostly don’t. Don’t have the energy or ambition to do so, in large part due to my health.
Our exchanges fall into a pattern: I’ll write her a message, commenting on her previous email plus maybe a tiny number of out of the ordinary enough things to be of at least minimal interest that have happened to me over the past 3 to 5 weeks.
She replies in less than 24 hours with a long message with comments on what I said, plus full of her and offsprings interesting doings, plus maybe a mention of something relevant to our core interests.
And then I reply a month or so later.
I used to feel super bad at not holding up my end better, but the truth is, I just didn’t have enough ‘new’ going on in my life to justify more frequent messages.
But fortunately she is apparently completely chill at my slowness. When she gets an email a month later, she’s happy to talk to me. And the huge gaps? Then she talks to others of her myriad friends. And somehow we muddle along with our asymmetrical relationship. Though there have been one or two gaps where she’s sent me a quick message just to be sure I hadn’t died or something…
