Email, How Do I Love You? Let Me Count the Ways.

Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

I got my first one in college in 1996.

It was so new. So strange. So exciting.

My first email address that is.

I still remember it. Babe@xxxxxxx.com.

Yep. Babe. The pet name my boyfriend at the time (now my husband) called me.

Can you believe it? I got in so early I was the only Babe. It wasn’t Babe1 or Babe55. I was just Babe.

Back in 1996 I didn’t use email very much except for the occasional email to friends from high school who were also away at college.

That changed a year later when my soon-to-be fiance and I were living in separate states. I didn’t have a computer where I lived, so in the evenings after I left the newspaper office I worked at I went to the library to use their computers to email him. Oh, the mushy-gooshy “love emails” we wrote to each other! I still have copies of them somewhere. I’ll spare you the gag inducing details.

After we became engaged we used email to plan our wedding and our honeymoon.

You have to understand email was groundbreaking back then. You didn’t have to wait for a hand written letter to come in the mail. You didn’t have to pick up the phone. You could just email. And it was free. And it was instant. Sort of. This was before IM and social media.

I fell hard for email and I never looked back.

I don’t like talking on the phone. Writing letters by hand takes to long. But email is fast, simple and can still be made personal with a little literary flair. Since I’m a writer at heart, that’s not hard for me.

Today email makes my life easier. I use it for business and to keep in touch with family and friends. I even email my grocery list to my smart phone. I always forget my list, but I never forget my phone.

My love affair with email is definitely a long-term relationship.