E-mail divorce

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized

I am going to share an image with you.  I predict that you will have one of two responses to this  image:

  1. Nothing
  2. Your eye will start twitching and you will run to find your own phone just to ensure that those little red numbers aren’t really there… Dear God is that 5,793 UNREAD EMAIL MESSAGES?!?!  The horror….

In case it isn’t obvious, I am in camp 1.  This is a screenshot of my phone.  I leave e-mails unread, voicemails unlistened to, I have no earthly idea what Redbox wants to tell me 77 times, and none of this bothers me.  My husband is in camp 2.  He has a sparkling clean, organized, empty inbox.  He clears up all those calendar items, whatever they are.  Mostly, our relationship is pretty symbiotic.  He deletes stuff he needs sometimes, but I can find that precious message in my heaps of electronic data.

Today we reached an impasse.  We have had a shared e-mail address since we have had e-mail.  We’ve managed our oil and water methods by keeping two outlook accounts where he can delete everything and I keep everything.  However, a year ago we bought a crappy computer, moved to gmail and our system fell apart. Two outlooks was too much for the computer to handle so he took over the e-mail management.  He moved everything into folders I couldn’t search and kept the inbox at a 50ish e-mail limit, thinking that was a compromise.  But this was no compromise.  This was him managing our joint inbox his way, and I hated it.  So today we’ve had our first divorce in our relationship.  6 years after going to shared money, 10 years after getting married, 15 years after buying our first house, and 18 years after our first date I am leaving him and our shared e-mail.  He gets custody, and I’ll have some visitation rights while I move my electronic stuff to my own place.  We’ll still have some shared responsibility, but really it’s better for everyone this way.  Me, my husband, and all those poor messages who have been stuck in the middle this past year.  I can’t wait to watch my 5,973 unread messages start growing again.

12 thoughts on “E-mail divorce”

  2. I love the personality you inject into every sentence of this piece. I’m torn. Until recently, I liked to keep a clean inbox, but lately I’ve been collecting emails as well! Those poor messages caught in the middle…

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    1. Thanks Juliette! My clean inbox days ended long ago. I try to just ignore the sales and spam, but I know I even miss real messages now. Thankfully I don’t beat myself up over this character flaw.

      Liked by 1 person

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    1. I was really surprised to find out that my email maintenance habits were a “dirty little secret.” It’s fun to pull out my smartphone and watch people’s reactions.

      I am annoyed that technology has caused a rift in my home communications though.

      Good to hear from you after my long delay in posting!

      Liked by 1 person

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      1. I meant to reply to this! That Japan trip really wiped me out. At any rate, yes…all those emails sent my heart racing!!! But I guess if that’s the only rift you guys have (concerning technology), then that’s not too bad, right?

        Liked by 1 person

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