How to know if your girl is seeing someone on the side

There may come a time when you suspect something. Maybe you've had a fight. Maybe an old boyfriend is in town. Maybe your love interest has begun acting a little less interested. For whatever reason, you may suspect that she's seeing someone on the sly. (And yes, I'm writing this specifically from the Guy's p.o.v., because I'm a guy, and I've been through this. Ladies reading this may want to stop right now.)

Let's leave aside, for now, the whole debate over whether you should or shouldn't be jealous, should or shouldn't get mad if your lady is seeing someone else, and so on. Those are legit topics for another day. Right now let's concentrate on more practical matters. Let's talk about how you can know whether she's getting a little extra attention on the side.

Obviously, if she's "away" a lot or is ignoring your calls and spending much less time with you, that's a warning sign, but let's take that as a given.

Here are the things that have tipped me off in the past. (Yes, I am talking from actual experience now.)

Look in her car for trinkets, gifts, love offerings of a seemingly trivial nature but that sure as hell didn't come from you.

Look in her car and (if possible) her apartment for custom-burned love-song CDs created by a new "friend." Check her iTunes playlist to see if her musical tastes have suddenly darted off into the weeds. Have her car radio stations changed? Does she listen to different kinds of music now than she liked before? Don't laugh. I've found this to be a very interesting clue as to who's screwing with who.

If you have access to her phone bill, take a look at the incoming and outcoming calls. Are there lots of calls to a new number?

Caller ID on the cell phone -- same thing. Check and see who's been calling who.

The next time you come to her apartment, immediately excuse yourself and head to the bathroom. Is the toilet seat already up?

Does she take a particular day or night of the week off (and not want to see you that day), that she never took off before? Does she go out for lunch or go out shopping or [whatever] on one specific day of the week now? That's probably His day off.

Does she suddenly favor a new perfume? (Sure, women change favorite fragrances all the time, but you have to consider this in the context of the other indicators given here. By itself, it may mean nothing. But in conjunction with other signs of trouble, it could be quite meaningful.)

I know this is gross, but: Find the dirty-clothes hamper. Smell her undergarments. (You know what to smell for. Do I have to spell it out?)

Check her car odometer. Friday night if she says she's going to the mall with her best friend Sue, and you know that the mall is 5 miles away, but she comes home with 35 extra miles on the odometer and sticks to her mall-and-back story, you know something doesn't add up. Literally.

Oh, and one more thing: Try just asking her, straight out, to her face. Sometimes that can be the most effective way to get the information you're looking for -- even if she says nothing back.

A sneaky way to grab her interest

I accidentally discovered a sneaky way to grab a girl's interest. If you're trying to pique a woman's curiosity about you, this will do it.

Of course, you have to use discretion in how you play this card. Don't be an ass. Don't be a braggart, a loudmouth, a conversation-hog, or obnoxious in any way. To the contrary, be shy, demure, reticent, almost unwilling to talk. This is very sensitive stuff. She'll understand that.

So here's what I discovered. I was chatting on the phone with my new love-interest recently. We aren't exactly in a relationship (yet), although that's where we're headed. I very much want to accelerate that process, but she is still pretending it's never going to happen. It's a tug of war. Anyway, she knows that I was recently in a longterm relationship that broke off. I never bring that relationship up in conversation, by the way. She asks about it. That's the only reason it ever comes up.

But when she recently asked me how I was dealing with the emotional trauma of breaking up after that many years with someone, I said something like "Oh I'm fine. It's fine." Then I waited a precious few seconds, and gave up a sad-looking little laugh. I said: "It's ironic, though."

Naturally, she said: "What's ironic?"

I pretended to be very embarrassed for a moment, then nervously admitted "Just before we broke up, we had the best sex we ever had."

I apologized for being so explicit and told her I didn't mean to expose her to details about my past relationship(s). She feigned understanding.

And then a funny thing happened. Female curiosity kicked in. After a few seconds, she couldn't stand it any more. She just had to ask. "So," she said, "what was so good about it?"

I feigned surprise. "What? Oh, you mean the sex?" (At this point I pretended to get flustered. You have to play the "shy" act a little bit here. Don't come off cocky, that's not what you want. Not at all. Be careful. You're on thin ice now!) I collected my composure and finally said: "Well... it's kind of a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?"

Of course, that only heightened her curiosity. It was like fanning a bed of hot coals with a leafblower that leaks gasoline.

"Well," I said, "we told each other our fantasies. And it turned out we each had the same sexual fantasy. And we got very excited at the idea of making it real. We talked all about every detail of it. It was intense."

Again, fanning the flames.

I went on to describe a "fantasy" involving my ex- plus me plus another guy. But I made sure to point out that the only reason I would consider such a thing was that I was seriously in love with my partner and wanted to please her. (Of course, I painted my partner as a bit of an insatiable sex maniac.) I said that my girl was oversexed, and when she got turned on, she really did need extra stimulation. And I said that at that point in our relationship, my ex- and I had total trust in each other, and I was so in love, I would have done anything to please her. (This makes me sound like a real hero, naturally. What woman wouldn't want a guy that's that good to her?)

"But," she interrupted me, "wouldn't you be jealous if you saw another guy doing your girlfriend right in front of you?"

At this point I made up some bullshit answer like: "Well, at this point in my life I just do not find something like this threatening to my ego. And I'm very non-possessive. I figure, if she really wants me, and if we trust each other, then she'll still want me even if another guy has briefly been in the picture." (All total bullshit. All totally designed to make me sound like an unbelievably self-confident, unselfish, loyal, considerate, yet sexually accommodating, male. A total turn-on for a woman.)

My woman-friend listened in rapt astonishment as I explained the whole male-male-female 3-way fantasy scenario in great detail. After 15 minutes, she was nearly speechless with amazement -- and desire. The very next weekend, she booked us for 3 days at a fancy beach resort where we borked our brains out -- and she paid for the whole thing. (I bought her dinner on the second night.) I swear to you I am not making this up.

So there it is, a technique that I discovered by accident in the course of a casual conversation with a new lady-friend that, until that point, I had been pursuing very hard without much success. Telling her a few sexual fantasies in the utterly safe, non-threatening context of a former relationship that I was very much done with, turned out to be magical. It swiveled her head. She looked at me anew. It surprised both of us.

Figuring out the hidden subtext

I've been having this ongoing sidebar conversation with my new not-yet-but-soon-to-be girlfriend, who spends two hours a day (on average) chatting with me by IM (mostly) or phone. She insists we're not in a relationship and never will be -- which is already ludicrous, because first of all, you don't spend two hours a day talking to the same guy (and signing off your IM chats with hugs and kisses: xoxoxox) unless there's something more than friendship going on, and second of all you don't spend all night in bed hugging someone (although there was no sex) without at least something going on. But she is adamant that we certainly are not in a relationship. I know she's wrong, however, based on some interesting word choices she has made in chats.

She has consistently said (rarely, but consistently) that she is "afraid" of me. This is a surprising statement coming from a hard-driving, successful, aggressive professional woman (age 30) -- a superstar in the professional services arm of the software giant she works for -- who is almost never afraid of anything. I can't even imagine her being afraid of any human being in the world. It's ludicrous. Why would she say she's afraid of me? I'm the most non-threatening geek ever.

The short answer is, she has nothing to fear from me except involvement (in a serious relationship). That's absolutely the only thing she fears.

Something else she likes to say a lot is that "We're doomed." Now bear in mind, this is a lady who has consistently told me she does not need me, although she likes me. We've never even come close to making a commitment (of any kind) to each other, and she won't admit that we're more than just friends. I said to her once, when we were kissing (with her tongue down my throat), "Let's be a couple." She immediately drew back. "No," she said. "Let's not."

So why would she say "We're doomed"? What's doomed? Our non-relationship? The relationship that (according to her) we don't have is doomed?

Consider two people who really, really like each other's (online) company and like to chat at all hours. Maybe that's the essence of the relationship and it's just a friendship. According to my lady-friend, that's exactly what we have. Well, do you refer (in future tense) to that kind of friendship as "doomed"? Because of what, exactly? Doomed how? Why?

The only thing that can be doomed is the love affair that she is pretending won't' develop between us. She is scared spitless of that -- of falling in love, losing control. She is afraid of becoming emotionally invested in a relationship. For one reason or another, she imagines that it might fail and she'll get hurt. Therefore "we're doomed."

These word choices, "afraid" and "doomed", are very telling. They're orthogonal (semantically) to ordinary notions of friendship. They only make sense in a context of commitment and emotional investment. The fact that she chose those words means she has strong feelings, positive feelings, about us -- and she's afraid of what that may mean. She knows she could be falling in love. She knows this is about more than casual conversations and online chats. This is real. It's a real relationship forming.

So I guess the point is, consider the subtext. Don't ever expect a woman to say what she means and only what she means, because there's always a deeper meaning underneath the surface meaning of the words. The choice of words can tell you a lot about motivations and inner conflict. My girl is conflicted. But clearly it's for good reasons. She knows what she's afraid to say out loud: I might be The One.

2nd-Best Weight Loss Plan in the World

I have determined that the second-best weight loss plan in the world is (of course) falling too much in love, too quickly, with a person who is just too beautiful, too smart, and too geeky. The harder you fall, the more weight loss you can expect (at least initially). For added effectiveness, might I suggest that you make sure your plan also includes geographic remoteness. My gal is 500 miles away. We stay in touch by chat and phone, with the occasional lip-to-lip visit.

I fell in love with this girl a little faster (not by much, though) than she fell in love with me, and so in the early weeks I built up a bit of a "longing debt," made all the worse when she went overseas for 3 weeks to visit family in eastern Europe. I started to pine. Really pine.

I forgot about food for a while, or at least it didn't interest me as much. Maybe that's because I took to smoking cigarets, to cut the pain. I was nervous, agitated, couldn't sleep.

Oddly enough, I was losing one pound per week even though I started consuming beer heavily. The beer not only didn't show up on my belly, my belly actually shrank.

I've had this whole experience happen once before, when I fell in love with a certain southern belle whose beauty and charm so captivated me that I had to force myself to eat when we went out to dinner. Food didn't interest me when we were together. I always had knots and butterflies in my stomach.

So in my case, right now as I write this, it's been 10 weeks since I met this particular geeky gal (who is a U.S.-based services rep for a very large European enterprise-software firm). And I have lost exactly 10 pounds. Mind you, I graduated high school at 153 pounds, and ballooned up to 178 over a period of ten years or so. I am now at 168. And still dropping, after almost 3 months. I really love that girl.

At this point you're probably wondering what the first-best weight loss program in the world would be (aside from being convicted of a capital crime). The most effective weight loss program is to be dumped by a woman you're seriously in love with. It's hard to eat solid food in the fetal position.

Why does she ask me what I see in her?

Sometimes in this blog I write about what I know (from experience), other times I write about what I don't know (but want to learn about, from others). This time it's both.

My lady-friend of 3+ months has, on quite a few occasions, usually while we're chatting (via GTalk), since we live 500 miles apart, but also sometimes by phone, and even a couple times in person, asks me what I ever saw in her t hat attracted me to her in the first place.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to such a question is one of astonishment. It leaves me speechless. (Which, of course, is not a good answer to the question!) It's almost like a lack-of-trust issue, to me. It's like, Hey, give me some credit, I chose you because I really, really like you, does the reason really matter so much?

Of course it matters. A woman wants to be sure it's not all based on bullshit. Guys come, guys go. They want different things, say different things. I understand that.

So I tell her things like "I knew when I first saw you that I had to learn more about you, and the more I learned, the more I found that was exciting. I mean, where do I begin? There's no one like you. You're super-intelligent; that excites the heck out of me. You're attractive. You have a beautiful smile. You value the important things in life -- people, relationships, small mammals. Well, maybe the small mammals aren't that important. We can talk about it later..."

I prattle on like that until she gets tired of listening to me, basically. But the hard part is this: We're separated by hundreds of miles. For the first two months, we chatted (IM) without having seen each other in person. When you're talking to someone you haven't met in person or even spoken to on the phone, how do you explain what attracted you?

In my case, I wasn't planning on any of this happening. It was all accidental, or feels that way. I got into a Twitter exchange with this person. Then I started following her blog. I liked her picture, but not that much, really. What I liked about it was her smile. Her overall look was not screaming at me "You've got to have this woman, she's a knockout, she's beautiful," etc. (Not that I go chasing after every woman who has a pretty face anyway.)

But as I saw more and more pictures of her, I realized that in every picture, she was smiling with that infectious smile that leaps out at you, right off the screen. I finally IM'd her and asked her about it. "How come you've got that smile in every picture I see of you?"

She answered back something coy like "It's the outcome of a carefully planned succession of happy moments." (via chat)

And (via chat) I replied something like: "Ah yes. The Successive Happy Moments Pattern. I think I read about it in the Gang-of-Four book."

One thing led to another. Literally every time I found out a new fact about her, I was blown away. She has an amazing resume, an amazing mind, some huge career accomplishments, a huge network of amazing friends and colleagues, she's well liked by everyone who has ever come in contact with her, and yes, she's pretty. I've come to see her as beautiful now, truth be told.

But how do you explain all that in a few words? "Choosing" her was not based on some catalog of characteristics that I saw up front. It's not like buying a car. My "choosing" her was actually a somewhat lengthy and organically evolving process that happened to lead me to where I am now -- which is to say, thoroughly in love (although she is lagging a few steps behind).

She still asks once in a while why I chose her. I don't think she asks because she's insecure. She's a very strong, confident person, and she knows how I feel about her. I think she's either testing me, or trying to tell me "You don't know everything you need to know about me; be sure you know what you're getting into; be sure you want me for the right reasons."

It'll all become clear eventually, of course.

Comments?

Flowers can backfire

In yesterday's post I was talking about how I sent flowers to my new lady friend after finding her address on my own (through some online research) since I knew she didn't give out her address to strangers -- particularly ones she meets online -- and anyway, I didn't want to spoil the surprise by alerting her to the fact that I might be sending her something.

Well, it kinda backfired on me. And it became a bit of a learning experience. No major harm done, but I learned a couple of things nonetheless.

If you'll recall, my girl has a vanity domain name, and all I had to do to get her physical address was do a "whois" style lookup. Her registrar had the complete physical address including the apartment number.

I happened to know (from a comment she made in a long-ago chat) that my lady friend likes sunflowers. So I decided to send her sunflowers as a surprise. Except, it wouldn't really be a surprise.

Allow me to explain.

The week prior to this, my lady friend and I met in person for the first time (after weeks of GTalk conversation) at a professional show (convention, conference) in California, and as luck would have it, that F2F meeting went unexpectedly well. One night, during the week-long convention, I left a sunflower in a water-filled ice bucket outside her hotel-room door while she was out to dinner with some friends. She was thrilled to find it when she came back from dinner. The rest, I'll tell some other time.

So. Given the prior week's events, I decided it was not necessary to include a note with the sunflowers that I was having delivered to her physical home address. I knew that she would know immediately who the flowers were from.

As it turns out, she did figure it out pretty quickly. She got in touch by IM and scolded me about the flowers.

"What, you don't like them?" I asked, innocently.

"First of all," she said, "don't ever send flowers without a note. That's just a bad idea all the way around. Plus, you should know that I've had boyfriends in the recent past. They all know that I like sunflowers. If it hadn't been for our week in California, I would've been left guessing who the real sunflower-sender was."

I could see her point. Yes, that's true. A girl might very well be left wondering which ex-boyfriend is suddenly sending flowers, and why.

But there was more.

"For what it's worth," she said, continuing to scold me, "you should know that the address you sent the flowers to is my ex-husband's address. I lived there when I registered my domain name, but I've since moved. When the flowers came, my ex- was not home but his girlfriend was, and she thought they were for her."

Ouch. I hurt some strange woman's feelings by not including a note. How thoughtless. And I was too stupid even to consider that it might not only be an out-of-date address -- but her ex-husband's address! Double ouch.

So I learned a few things. Mostly I learned not to be cocky and trigger-happy when it comes to sending love-offerings. Things can backfire in funny ways, even when you're sure you've done something good.

Let my ouch be your gain, my friend.

Sending flowers when you don't know her address

I had an interesting problem recently. I wanted to send my new love flowers, but she lives hundreds of miles away and I don't know her address, and she's a very private person (to the point of paranoia, frankly), and our relationship is very new, so I didn't want to rock the boat (or spoil the surprise) by asking her for her address.

I considered my options.

• Ask her employer for her address -- a no-no. Definitely not a good idea, and it would be unprofessional, frankly, for her employer to give me her address. (She works at home, incidentally.)
• Ask a mutual friend. Not possible: I don't know anyone who has her address.
• Do a reverse phone lookup? I only had her cell phone number. (That's all she has. No landline.) And with a reverse lookup on a cell phone, address info doesn't come free. You have to pay for it. It's only $5 in many cases, but still -- why pay $5 if you don't have to? (Actually, I did go this route -- and got an address that was years out of date.)
• I could ask her directly. But I didn't want to do this. It would raise suspicion -- and spoil the surprise. I wanted the flowers to come as a surprise. That was the whole point.

I hit upon a brilliant solution. My web-savvy love interest, it turns out, has her own vanity domain name (e.g., firstname-lastname.com). Knowing her, I knew it would be a genuine domain name (not an alias), registered with a real domain-name registrar. (And I was right.) And I knew that her address would be on file with the registrar -- because it's required. You have to give an address when you take out a domain name. I did a WHOIS search and found out that her vanity domain name was indeed registered to her -- and there was her address! The registration information was two years old, but I knew she was probably still at the same address, because she had told me once that she hates nothing more than moving.

Sure enough, I sent flowers and they arrived at the right address. Mission accomplished!

But the mission didn't go entirely well. More about that in my next post.

My least favorite arguing antipattern

My least favorite thing to have happen in the middle of an argument is for the other person to just shut me out and run away (whether figuratively or literally). I don't mind someone saying (or screaming) "I don't want to talk about it any more right now." That's fine. But don't walk out the door, or hang up the phone on me, or just abruptly stop talking and go about your business. That's infantile. It's how a child acts. It is literally tantrum-like. And it's not helpful.

It's very simple: All couples argue. Sooner or later everyone has arguments. The couples that succeed in having a longterm relationship are those that "make it through" the arguments intact. Couples who know how to argue win out over couples who don't, it's as simple as that.

Nothing guarantees failure in an argument as much as total, willful communication breakdown. If one person's style of arguing is to stop talking and run away, and shut the other person out, that's a guaranteed recipe for failure. The relationship is doomed right there. It's a North Korean bargaining style that just does not work.

So when I'm in a new relationship and it's one that I want to last, I look carefully at how my partner argues. Is she a screamer? Is she prone to violent rages? Does she get physical? Does she name-call? Does she bring logic to bear in an argument? Or when the going gets tough, does she simply get in her car, leave without saying good-bye, and disappear for days without returning phone calls?

Running away is bullshit. Shutting someone out is bullshit. Tantrums and deliberate unwillingness to engage in conversation are bullshit.

I've tried the 10-Day Bullsht Diet Plan before, and I can tell you, it does work great for losing weight. But I'm not going on that plan again any time soon. I can guarantee you that.

What is it with women and horoscopes?

Okay, I didn't mean that to sound like a put-down. Please bear with me for a second. I'll tell you a story.

I met a woman not long ago. We hardly knew each other. We're finding out things like birthdays, family backgrounds, etc.

She asks what month my birthday is in. I tell her.

"Oh!" she exclaims knowingly. "We're Fire Signs. No wonder!"

"No wonder what?"

"No wonder there's so much of [ whatever ] between us." (I think she referred to some sort of cosmic energy or personal electricity, something like that. Something indicating a good impedance match.)

I came very close to making a dismissing comment like "You don't really believe all that horoscope bullshit, do you?" But instead, I wisely held my tongue.

In subsequent conversations, I found out very quickly that she is not an astrology nut of the certifiably insane variety; nor particularly religious or spiritual in any conventional way. She's a geek, after all, which means there's a certain amount of core logic in her brain that accepts the fundamental ascendancy of bosonic reality over daily horoscopes and fortune cookies.

Nevertheless, women are plugged into a little different kind of universe than men are. They can pick up vibrations at wavelengths that the male antenna, being only six inches long, cannot pick up.

Over subsequent days and weeks, we never talked about astrological signs, but I started thinking about the various forces that brought the two of us together (an unlikely pairing, seemingly instantiated by random happenstance). And I started to wonder whether higher forces -- "the stars," the universe, God, whatever -- might be at work after all, since I had no better explanation for some of the really odd coincidences that seemed to keep putting us on the same path.

I don't read horoscopes, don't believe in them, never will. But sometimes I talk to my lady-friend on the phone at night, standing on my back porch. And when we finish talking for the night, I invariably (if it's a clear night) take one final look up at the stars, just to marvel at them.

And you know what? Sometimes I feel them looking back.

Then I go inside, throw my empty beer can in the trash, flop on the bed, and smirk, shaking my head.

Naw.

Can teasing violate the Geneva Conventions?

I think we all know the answer to that. Teasing can be cruel. Sometimes it can be incredibly cruel. Especially if one person is trying to be sincere and express heartfelt emotions, and the other person is alternately stroking and dissing her erstwhile-affectionate would-be partner.

My lady friend is a huge, huge teaser. And by that I mean her teases not only scale up, but scale out. The magnitude of any given tease-instance can be huge. She might say something as huge as "I'm going to leave you, don't call me any more", totally in jest, but totally convincingly. But her teases scale out in a peculiar way, too, in that they cover multiple domains and can "flip sense" logically, in intermittent fashion, as she tries to keep me off-balance.

There's also an interface called Sarcasm that, if implemented by a subclass of Tease, can apply an Aspect of extra pain in all this.

After a while, the sarcasm and teasing wears me out, frankly. And it's depressing, because I know that at this point in our relationship, I'm more emotionally committed than my lady-friend is, and I want her to progress a little faster toward the finish line. I want her to catch up with me on the "seriousness" front. Instead, there's still an awful lot of game-playing. Much of it is playful and fun. I enjoy it a lot of the time. But some of it is clearly hard-wired into her personality. She's a tough, feisty little nutbuster.

But what's a guy to do? You tell me. Should I insist that she tone it down (and look like a wimp who can't take a little teasing)? Or should I continue my facade of good-natured bravado a while longer, until she either becomes more serious about me -- or starts to bore me to the point where I leave?

Teach me. Somebody. Please.

Should you date someone from the same planet?

In decades gone by, the big question used to be: Should you date someone in the office? The traditional wisdom being No, you should not, because:

1. Other people in the office will find out (sooner or later) and it could be embarrassing.

2. It upsets the balance of power. If you're a manager and you date one of your direct reports, "favoritism" becomes an issue. Even if you're peers, it upsets the perceived relationships of the two of you with coworkers. No one knows if they can tell you something in confidence without it leaking to your partner. (Etc.)

3. If you eventually break up, you have to stare your ex-partner in the face every day at work. Highly uncomfortable (potentially).

So the usual advice is: Don't date someone who works in the same office where you do. But that's no longer logical. In a world of constant connectivity, we're all in the same virtual office, all the time. Think about it. Everyone you work with (whether they work from home, come in to an office, or whatever) has e-mail, most are probably on Facebook or Twitter (or both), etc. People Tweet stuff or IM stuff without you even knowing about it. Pretty soon it becomes clear that the world is a very small place indeed. The world is your office, my friend.

So don't worry about dating someone in the office. Your office is planet Earth. The question is whether you should date someone from Mars.

When she only wants to Chat, Part 3

As I've been saying in previous posts, I've been carrying on a leisurely long-distance relationship with someone for about 3 months now, and we communicate almost entirely by instant message (GTalk). We chat. A lot. Like, hours every night, without fail.

This particular person (whom I care for very much now) is 600+ miles away and simply prefers IM to phone conversation. At first I thought that was strange. Why chat when you can talk? My fingers get tired of typing after a while.

But you know what? After a few months of doing this (and after seeing her in person a few times and talking on the phone with her maybe half a dozen times this past month), I've come to see that chat has a few things in its favor that yapping on the phone does not.

It's easy to blurt things out of your mouth when you're being free and easy and relaxed with someone, and that, frankly, is dangerous if you're a guy. I speak without thinking all the time. It's instinctive. I like to free-associate and say what I think, spontaneously. As a result, I often put my foot so far into my mouth that it's hanging out my ass. That's much harder to do when you have to type a message on a keyboard, then hit Send.

I'm a pretty fast typist (in short bursts), but still, it takes a while to type a message, even a short one. I can speak it much faster than I can type it. But that's a good thing, the fact that typing slows you down is a good thing. Because while you're typing, you get to think about what you're saying. You get to choose between a choice of synonyms for something, fine-tuning the nuance of whatever you were going to say, with much better precision than if you blurted it out. You get to revise, edit, proofread. By the time you're ready to hit Send, you've had much more of a chance to think about what you're saying than if you were on the phone blurting something out spontaneously. Sure, we're only talking milliseconds here, in some cases. But you know what I've found out? Milliseconds can be the difference between sounding like a complete f*cking jackass and maintaining your deceptively gentlemanly online persona.

If you're wise, you'll consciously slow it down -- type even slower than usual . And always keep in mind that you can backspace before hitting Send. Your mouth is send-only, there is no Backspace.

The other thing that's good about chat is this thing called the chat log. Chat logs are handy, because if you have a really good night of chat (a good conversation) you can go back and re-live the good parts by reading the transcript. By the same token, if you had a fight, you can go back and find out who said what; you have a forensic tool for figuring out what went wrong.

Chat logs, I've found, are also great for settling arguments. If your partner says "You never told me you were planning to play poker at Jimmy's house tomorrow night!", you can whip out the chat log and say "I beg your pardon, it's right here in the chat log for November 19 at 8:38 pm. Refer to line 449."

And actually, there's less room for misunderstanding in an IM conversation than in a phone conversation. Again, it's because you're choosing words and writing them down (typing them) when you use IM. With voice, you use a different vocabulary -- the colloquialisms of everyday spoken language -- and (have you ever noticed this?) the terms of everyday speech tend to be overloaded, semantically, much more so than the words you choose when you write (type) something. The precision of a typed message trumps the fuzziness of spoken language, in my experience. It goes a long way toward avoiding misunderstanding.

But of course, there'll still be misunderstandings -- that goes without saying. Words can always get you in trouble, no matter what the mode of delivery.

I guess my bottom line here is: Don't minimize the potential benefits of chat. Especially when you're early in a relationship and you haven't learned each other's "lingo" and want to avoid misunderstandings. There's something to be said (silently) for Chat.

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.

When she only wants to Chat

I met someone a while ago on Twitter. She tried to DM (direct-message) me and couldn't, because I hadn't befriended her, so she contacted me offline and we agreed to use GTalk to IM each other.

One night, we started a chat that went almost to the wee hours of the morning. It was nice, it was fun, it was great, but I thought okay, this is just a fluke onetime occurrence. The next night, same thing. The night after that, same thing. Pretty soon we were chatting an average of 2+ hours a night on Google Talk. Every, single, night.

You can't help but develop a fairly intimate virtual friendship after 10 or 20 or 30 hours of chatting. Pretty soon a lot of flirting has happened and you're signing off with "xoxo" and using words like honey and darling.

But in my case, the lady (should I say "girl" or "lady"? She's 30) lives hundreds of miles away, I've never seen anything but her online picture(s), and I'm wondering, Who is this person, really?

So naturally, I want to call her up on the phone.

But when I tell her this, she says no, please don't. I press her further, and she resists. She does not want to talk on the phone.

I considered the possibilities. Maybe she's actually living with someone and she's afraid her boyfriend will pick up the phone? Maybe she doesn't want to run up her cell-phone bill? (That's all she has is a cell phone.) Maybe she's embarrassed about her command of English or her accent? (She's from a non-English-speaking country.) Maybe she's hearing impaired or voice-impaired?

One by one I eventually ruled all of those possibilities out. In the meantime, though, I quickly backed away from the whole topic. I stopped asking if I could call. And I stopped asking why. (She said she just doesn't like phones. Um... right.)

I'm running out of room (and time) right now to finish this discussion, but I want to pick up on this topic tomorrow, so please come back and hear me out tomorrow. And let me know what you think.

A Love-Blog for Programmers? Written by a Guy?? WTF?

Yeah, I'm a guy, I'm a programmer, I write about romance and heartbreak -- get over it. Guys have feelings too. But make no mistake, this is not just a blog about guys, or for guys, or about girls, or for girls, or about relationships -- it's all of the above, plus a lot of personal soul-searching; it's therapy for yours truly, at times. And yeah, some of you out there are going to think it's just plain gay. But you know what? Gay people have hearts too. So if you're one of those insensitive mouth-breathers who think gay people are somehow different from the rest of the human race when it comes to matters of the heart, you can stop right here and go do you-know-what to yourself.

Know well, this blog is from the heart: It is based on heartfelt emotions and true-life experiences. It's a no-bullsh*t zone. And I count on your input (your comments) to help keep things real. If you have insights of your own to add, hard-won lessons to share, or you just want to pour your heart out for whatever reason at all, feel free to contribute. I look forward to your input. The world needs more people who know how to pour their hearts out.

One more thing. If by any chance you find anything of value here, anything you enjoyed reading or that helped you in some way, please tell a friend. This is the only programmer's blog with a geeky guy stupid enough to dump his heart out in public every day. Pass it on.

Inaugural Post

This will be a different kind of blog. I promise you.