In the movie "You've Got Mail," Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks fall in love over cutesy e-mail messages.
The idea makes Stacy Cormier want to scream. The 27-year-old graduate student at Columbia University in New York knows the dark side of Internet romance."I like to think that I've always been honest with you," began an October e-mail from her then-boyfriend, Andy McDonald, 28, who works in Silicon Valley. "I can't think of a time when I've misled you, and I don't want to start now."
Then came the zinger: "I feel wrong not telling you that I think I'm in love." With someone named Kim.
Ms. Cormier's response to being ambushed via e-mail? "I was absolutely floored," she says. "We literally had been on the phone an hour before. But he was too chicken to say it."
While e-mail has made it easier -- not to mention cheaper -- to maintain long-distance romances, many couples are finding this new medium can wreak its own, peculiar havoc.
In the fragile language of love, the offhand e-mail comment is at times misunderstood, often leading to full-blown flaming. Misspellings and bad grammar can be as annoying to one half of an e-mail couple as the errant toothpaste cap. Technological glitches can delay delivery of e-mail missives, resulting in the inevitable, "Where were you last night?" accusations. And, as Ms. Cormier discovered, e-mail has revived the popularity of the "Dear John" letter, in the process denying many a jilted lover the opportunity to cry, plead or just rant in person.
Moreover, technology has its limitations. Andrew Beebe, 27, an Internet entrepreneur in San Francisco, and Jessica Barrows, 30, a television news producer in Washington, D.C., have tried nearly every new gadget to keep aflame the romance they began at a Maine summer house two years ago.
"We've done e-mail. We've done ICQ," a program owned by America Online Inc. that lets users chat in real time, Ms. Barrows says. "We've even done this newfangled gadget that was a video camera on Andrew the whole time, and every three seconds it would take a new picture."
But ICQ kept crashing. And the video camera, which beamed images of Andrew at work to a Web site Ms. Barrows could access, took unflattering photos. "The picture was mangled, and it always showed him with weird expressions on his face," she says. "The picture I have of him in my head is this handsome, self-assured picture of Andrew."
Then there was the time last November when Ms. Barrows tried to e-mail Mr. Beebe an animated clip of "The Simpsons," his favorite television series, that showed Bart exclaiming, "Don't have a cow, man!" The romantic gesture caused a meltdown on his laptop.
"I had to sit there for three hours and wait for the thing to download," says Mr. Beebe, who was traveling for work at the time. "I told her that she had totally crashed my ability to do my business." Ms. Barrows says tersely, "I've stopped sending him cute things. I'm all business now."
In fact, many people find themselves annoyed by the "cute" things their lovers send via e-mail. Last October, Tracy Poverstein bought a computer at the urging of her network-engineer boyfriend of five years. While the couple lived only about an hour apart and saw each other every weekend, she expected that they would exchange love notes and heartfelt e-mail messages during the week.
Instead, she got spammed.
"I ended up getting all of the mail that he forwarded to everyone, like computer jokes," the 27-year-old actress in New York says. "Then, all of his friends would send me their e-mail."
Ms. Poverstein and the spammer have since parted. She says her new boyfriend, Michael Smith, a composer in Los Angeles, is a more romantic wordsmith.
One of the big disadvantages of e-mail is that typed text doesn't capture the vocal and physical nuances of emotion -- such as coldness, coyness or flirtation -- that readily come across in person or over the phone. Thus, a volley of messages can quickly escalate into an e-mail arms race.
When Eileen Dzik's boyfriend sent an e-mail saying he wanted to vacation without her, Ms. Dzik composed a caustic retort, knowing she wouldn't be interrupted with excuses or explanations. "I had time to sort of stew about it. Without getting any feedback from him, I just threw out all of my anger in a nasty e-mail."
The couple -- he in Israel on business, she in Washington, D.C. -- lobbed four or five more biting notes back and forth. "I still haven't deleted them," says Ms. Dzik, 38, a documentary filmmaker. "They still make me cringe. It was the worst fight we ever had." The couple eventually made up-over the telephone.
Ending a romance started in cyberspace can be just as trying. Dana Steinberg, 26, a public-relations executive in Washington, D.C., had a two-year relationship with a graduate student in Royal Oak, Mich., whom she met in a Jewish community online chat room. When they broke up, Ms. Steinberg immediately deleted his name from her America Online buddy list, which tells users whenever one of their e-mail pen pals is also online.
But Michael didn't delete Ms. Steinberg's name from his buddy list. And so she still gets the occasional "how are you doing" message from the guy who dumped her.
Then there is the matter of dumping a lover via e-mail. For his part, Mr. McDonald defends his method for breaking the bad news to Ms. Cormier, the Columbia University graduate student. "I have a very hard time discussing my feelings," he says. "E-mail is a whole lot easier, and more immediate than writing a letter."
Among the feelings he shared in his "Dear John" letter to Ms. Cormier were details about his love: "I'm very happy with Kim. I want to hold her hand in public. I feel giddy when she's around and empty when she's not," Mr. McDonald gushed.
As for Ms. Cormier, e-mail made it easier for her to exact revenge: She forwarded Mr. McDonald's letter to 15 of her closest friends -- who responded with a torrent of vitriol against him.