Max sent Ally this email Monday, and its stark minimalism hit us in an unusual place. There is no purple prose, no obfuscation, no layers of excuse-making and therapyspeak, no eccentric-but-telling extraneous detail to lavish over. It is simply, in its purest form, crap. It is the email that, at age twenty-two, a friend gets from a guy she's been fucking and while she's crying you secretly think she's lucky, that everyone should get the truth laid out so cleanly and honestly and forcefully, that building up emotional unavailability sufficient to navigate one's twenties is something you can do quickly, like tearing off a band-aid. But by the time you hit 25 or 26 you realize that no, there is something about being hurt, deeply, over and over and over again, that you can't replicate with a simple sharp cut. So anyway, suffice it to say Ally was old and bruised and beaten-down enough to have reached that stage where you experiment with not sleeping with a guy for awhile, if you actually like him and you suspect he's the type who's hurt girls before. She and Max had been at that for two months when one night, he flaked out on their plans and she called him on it. And yeah, if you're curious, he's too old for this shit.
From: Max
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 08:03:05 -0400
To: Ally
Subject: Re: To reiterate, in word form
You deserve more respect than I've been treating you with. I think you pretty much nail it in this email. I tend to walk all over girls I date, in the sense that they aren't as high a priority as they ought to be. You are not an exception, and I will only grow more selfish (inconsiderate) in the future. For example, this week will be worse than last week.
I am not capable of giving you what you deserve in a relationship, even an "alternative" relationship, so, we should stop seeing each other. I think you are awesome, but I think it's impossible to be together.