Romance at First Click? Ha.

"Well, you e-mailed him first, which shows a lot of interest," my friend Jeff said. "The girl should be wary though, because if the guy doesn't like you, it can scare away the guy."

"But he pursued me first! He even e-mailed me with his cell number!" I protested, referring to an earlier exchange.

"If there is a girl that I am interested in, I never IM or e-mail her first," Jeff said, without regard to the contradiction that if two people interested in each other both followed his advice, they'd never make contact. But never mind that. Had I really shown my cards too soon?

"There is a huge fear of being too eager," agreed my friend Rachel, a sex columnist in the campus newspaper. "People say 'I can't e-mail him again' or 'I can't IM him first' too many times. It may seem standoffish, but it's not."

Now I was just as confused as before. To e-mail or not to e-mail, that remained the question. This was a situation where I needed to turn to my best friend and editor Diane. She and I always use the term "breezy" to describe the tone we try to take with the opposite sex.

"Breezy means sounding fun and light in your e-mails," she counseled. "You don't want anything too serious and you want to seem too busy for definite plans. It's good to proof each other's e-mails because it can be hard to tell if you sound like a crazy stalker."

"But e-mails are generally for longer, more emotional messages," warned Alex. Alex is another one of my guy friends, so I was counting on his insight. "E-mails are for something you plan, like asking her out."

Apparently I had unwittingly jumped to a form of communication that had men running for their lives. If it carries around all of this emotional weight, e-mail hardly seems to blame for our impersonal relations and atomized society. E-mail, at least for my guy friends, is one rung down on the emotional ladder from marriage proposals and shared bank accounts. As a result, hundreds of thousands of confused college women like me now decode these messages as if we are searching for hidden professions of love in the Rosetta stone.

Fearful that I might be scaring off my prospect through e-mail, I polled my friends about using IM in an attempt to connect with Vic. All agreed this would be preferable.

But IM could be equally dangerous and ambiguous. What if Vic posted a message indicating he wasn't there, when he really was? Or, if he forgot to post a message saying he was away from his computer, how would I know he wasn't just ignoring me?

No better than e-mail, IM was providing me with few instant answers: "Girls get all worked into a lather and think 'He doesn't like me' and that is so not true at all and it is totally in their head," Rachel comforted me. "People project onto their words, assuming the other person can understand their tone."

Listening to her, I realized that the technological revolution had left my social life pretty much where it would have been otherwise. Aside from the agonizing waiting and the uncertainty of not knowing whether there is actually another human on the end of the modem line, we still have to struggle to decipher every virtual pause, every potentially sarcastic remark and every outrageous sexual advance with nary a hand gesture nor facial expression.

Is this the fate of dating in the 21st century? Are members of my generation so fearful of and embarrassed about human interaction that we have resorted to hiding behind high-definition monitors and WiFi connections? Sitting futilely by our computers, we wait for a reply from princecharming@romance.com. I had hoped it wouldn't come to that. Instead, I had held on to a hope -- perhaps a delusional one -- that I could still use all this technology to foster a real human connection.

With my sorority's semiformal quickly approaching, I finally resorted to e-mail and wrote another message to Victor asking him to be my date. His reply was as follows: