At our final class, we passed around an e-mail list so we could keep in touch with one another. Although I dutifully scrawled my e-mail on a piece of binder paper, I had no intention of keeping in touch with anyone. That night, Steven invited me out to a bar with a couple of other students. I felt shy the whole time and said almost nothing, even though he put his arm around me briefly.

At one point an older male writer at the bar told Steven he should settle down and have children. Steven responded that he regularly trolled the Shakespeare section of the Schaumburg library in Illinois to meet a serious reader, but nobody ever came to that section of the library. I thought this was a clever strategy and couldn’t believe nobody ever showed up.

When I returned home to the Bay Area, I found an e-mail waiting from Steven, and I felt a little thrill. Then I read the message: “Anita, I have never met anyone so cold, aloof and intransigent. Steven.”

I don’t know what I expected, but definitely not this odd attack on my personality. The safety of e-mail, of course, is that you can say all the things that you would never have the courage to say in person, so I responded that I’d been attracted to him and uncomfortable because I didn’t think he liked me back. I wrote that I had a boyfriend, but if he got to know me better, he would see that he had been wrong.

We started e-mailing regularly about books and art. He invited me to visit him so I could see the van Gogh exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. I replied that I’d already seen the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but we kept exchanging daily e-mails.

A few years after we met, Steven moved in with a woman who lived in New Mexico. He planned to swing through the Bay Area before the move. A flurry of e-mails passed between us to try to arrange a time to meet, but we failed, and shortly afterward we stopped corresponding. That should have been it. For two people uninterested in technology, five years was a long time to conduct an e-mail friendship.