Brightstar writes "I had sent a note to one to call me so we can hear each other's voice instead of this endless emailing back and forth. She comes back with, isn't email good enough? How about I give you my personal email address, will that make you happy? Too bad she is this creepy, I really liked her otherwise. But now I have to question if she is a douchebag in all things in life."

Or possibly she's just not a phone person.

I just really dislike talking on the phone. What's creepy to me is that she wouldn't want to just go ahead and meet. But it's really hard for some people to have a comfortable, informative conversation over the phone. It's not a moral failing or implication of jerkiness in other aspects of life. It's just a difficult and unnatural way to have a conversation for a lot of people.

I second that, to which I add -- maybe she doesn't want you to have her phone number yet. Most people I know have cell phones in place of land lines, and even if I call someone without giving them my phone number, my number shows up on their phone -- which they can then save and do whatever they like with. I'm pretty cautious about who I give my number out to.

I just find talking to complete strangers on the phone extremely awkward. I've done so a couple of times because we had arranged to meet and were making 'when and where' plans over the phone, and the conversation was extremely stilted and uncomfortable. Once we met in person, everything was fine (more than fine, in fact -- we got on like gangbusters).

The 'continuing with email but not meeting' is definitely odd, although I haven't read this entire letters thread so I have no idea how long it's been going on. A few email exchanges before you meet seems quite reasonable since you're kind of feeling the situation out, but if it's lots and lots of email for several weeks then maybe she's not really feeling it. Or scared of making it real. I'm not a good first-date person myself, so that much I can understand.

What the hell? Assuming this is accurate -- where do people like this come from? Who raises them? Holy jeebus.

"Said he used a condom when he didn't"?

You can sort of tell - it's not like condom use is private from your partner.

You can tell if you've had sex with and without a condom, but if you're a teenager who has only ever had one sexual partner, what frame of reference would you have if you're with the kind of guy who is going to pull a stunt like that? It's pretty easy to slip a condom off in the dark, while fumbling around, or to pretend you're putting one on while under the covers.

Is "whinge" the new "whine?"

I've seen the word "whinge" coming up with more frequency lately in Salon and other audience-participation web sites. Is this just a mis-spelling of "whine" or another word entirely?

It's from England, or at least the first person I ever heard using it was English. It seems to have made its way over here in recent years.

Several in laws showed up in blue jeans and tee shirts.

Were they clean and pressed? Maybe that's all they have. What do they do for a living? Some people just don't own suits, especially if they can't afford them and/or have zero occasion to ever wear one. A friend of mine -- a professional making a decent salary -- just had to go out and buy two suits and have them fitted in 24 hours because his chosen vocation and social life has never required that he wear one.

They looked like fools. I was embarassed for them and I was so ticked I just ignored them, said not a word to them.

You are a disgrace. The purpose of etiquette isn't to make you look superior to everyone else with your grand manners, its to make everyone *else* feel comfortable in possibly awkward circumstances. You remind me of an ex-boyfriend, thank god we never got as far as discussion of the "m" word, that would have been a festival of snobbery.

In this day and age, when you have ads that feature shops offering beautiful gowns for brides under $1,000.00 (*ahem* David's Bridal). There is absolutely no excuse for showing up at someone's WEDDING dressed like you're hanging out on the corner. It's a major sign of disrespect (probably why the person who posted the story about this ignored the fashion purps).

My point was not to address the people who came clad in jeans, except maybe to point to an explanation beyond them being "trashy people" as the writer so graciously put it.

My point was that behaving rudely to people who are underdressed does not make you better than them, it makes you just as rude, only for different reasons.

Treat people respectfully, or don't. Just don't complain that Person A was disrespectful to you, and then in the next breath refer to them as "trashy" and tell the world how you intentionally snubbed. That just makes you a (rude) hypocrite.