When she only wants to Chat, Part 2

So as I was saying yesterday, I quickly developed a chat-buddy relationship with a really awesome lady I met almost by accident on Twitter. In a very short period of time, we found ourselves chatting two to three hours a night, every night, without fail, via Google Talk. But strangely enough, even though it was clear that we were headed toward an intimate friendship, my lady friend was adamant about not wanting to talk on the phone. She gave no real reason other than just not liking phones.

At work one day, I saw her on Skype and IM'd her, asking if she had a moment. When she said yes, I tried to call her via Skype. She immediately ended the call without saying hello! (then scolded me on IM)

A virtual slap in the face if there ever was one.

I was frustrated and hurt by the whole thing but quickly got control of my emotions and decided not to make an issue of it. I dropped the whole realtime vox-convo pursuit and never brought it up. We went back to chat-as-usual.

That was as of about three months ago. Let's fast-forward to today and I'll tell you how things have turned out and what I now think about the whole don't-call-me thing vis-a-vis IM as a primary mode of conversation.

A month after our virtual relationship began, my friend took a long-planned-in-advance trip to see family in Russia. The night before she left, I IM'd her and asked if I could call her in the morning to say bon voyage. She tried to explain how busy her day would be, and I interrupted and said "Look, I'm only asking for 30 seconds of your time. All I want to do is hear your voice, and say 'have a nice trip.'" She assented.

Amazingly, she pinged me via Skype the next morning, told me her flight schedule, and proposed a time when she would call me from the airport. I didn't think it would really happen -- but it did. She called me from the airport, at the appointed time. And we spent 3 or 4 minutes saying our good-byes. It was nice. It was very nice. And we both ended up very pleased that we decided to do that.

On her trip, she was in such a remote location that she didn't have internet connectivity most of the time, so we did no chatting whatsoever, and only sent a little e-mail back and forth.

When she got back to the U.S., we started our nighhtly chats again. And our friendship continued to grow.

And as happens when a friendship between a man continues to grow (beyond simple friendship), things happen -- such as arguments. We had our first fight. It was bad enough that she disconnected from me and our chat ended early, with me standing there wondering what to do next.

I didn't sleep well that night. So I got up early in the morning. The first thing I did was call her cell phone and leave a message, apologizing for the fight and asking her to forgive me.

She did forgive me. And she later told me she loved waking up to the sound of my voice.

We've since begun calling each other more often, although frankly if you knew how infrequent our calls are, you'd laugh. We still use chat as our primary means of communication. We use it a lot.

Tomorrow, in Part 3 of this verbal diarrhea outburst (and I promise, Part 3 will be the end of this topic), I'll tell you what I think is good about chat as a primary medium, and why the goods outweigh the bads, and why maybe (just maybe) you should avoid the phone, if you can -- and you can tell me whether (and to what degree) I'm wrong.