Romance at First Click? Ha.

I'm sorry, we actually have our Polo initiations on Thursday night which I can't miss, Thanks for the invite though...Laters -- Vic

My heart sank. I naturally turned to my loyal decoders to parse its true meaning. "Ouch," Jeff mocked me. "You got rejected by a freshman. Wow, way to go."

"No," rebutted Diane. "He has polo initiations; that is a legitimate excuse. He can't get out of that. That was not a brush-off."

"But he didn't even give her an apology," Jeff said. "Like 'Oh, I am so sorry, I would have loved to have gone, but I have to do so and so.' "

I had suspected as much, but I had hoped to get a more optimistic appraisal from my friends. It didn't look promising. I should have listened to Jeff. The rest of this ill-fated romance can pretty much be summarized by this IM conversation between my sister, "sennettor86," and me:

sennettor86: what happened to the frosh

runaround0: i wish i knew exactly, apparently i started freaking him out that things were getting too serious by emailing him and inviting him to the semiformal

sennettor86: what? did u go to the semiformal with him?

runaround0: no i went with my friend will and then . . . he showed up later and was dancing with other people, and i think he didn't know what to do cause i just kept dancing with will to make him jealous

sennettor86: ur nuts

So Victor and I are over. I found another date for Houseparties and decided that I still wanted to be friends with Victor. As Austen wrote, "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love." But at this point, the only thing to do is to talk to him in person. I can't handle any more decoding.

I've even persuaded Rachel, who once told me that there was no conversation you couldn't have online, that some things are better done in person. "You're right," she conceded. "I heard about this marriage via webcam that happened between a soldier in Iraq and his fiancee. Because of a technological error, there were eight seconds of black silence before he said 'I do' and the poor bride was freaking out."

I ask myself if all this technology has brought us more than webcam weddings and crossed signals. The biggest fallacy is that technology makes it easier to find Mr. Right. It turns out that 21st-century technology is no better a matchmaker than Austen's Emma was in 19th-century England. More often it softens the blow when you've found Mr. Wrong; a rejection is both easiest to write and to read in electronic text. The very delay and confusion inherent in these new forms of communication allow us to edit our words and mask the embarrassment better than we can in person.

Better yet, you can always tell yourself that he probably didn't have enough RAM in his hard drive anyway.

Author's e-mail:

sennett@princeton.edu

Amy Sennett will be a junior majoring in international and public affairs at Princeton University this fall.