Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Email and new friendships

I'm starting to wonder how helpful emails are in building friendships. For friends you have an existing relationship with that has been built over a significant period of time, it's different - they know you relatively well (hopefully!) and should have a fair idea of how to interpret what you've written. You can pretty much just be yourself.

But with new friends I find myself in a different place. Initially I'm all gung ho and happy to be myself, then after a little while I start thinking too hard about everything and worry about offending them, or asking too many questions, or sharing too much... I write and rewrite and rewrite, delete, rewrite, delete, and then after clicking send I think more about what I wrote and wonder whether I should have included bits I deleted, or deleted bits I included.

I'm thinking emails are not such a helpful tool for me to build new friendships, but I'm not sure how to get around it as email is such a big part of how we do life and interact and organise everything now.

Any thoughts?

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