Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

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When I was in middle school, I loved having penpals. We'd write back and forth every couple of weeks to talk about school, our families, our pets, vacations, whatever was going on in our lives. I would run out to the mailbox every day in the summer hoping to find an envelope from a faraway friend, often decorated with stickers or doodles. It's not unlike the way I sign into my email accounts every morning today.

I love getting mail, either email or the regular variety. Here's the thing: People don't share bad news by email. They will always call you or tell you in person. People don't break up by email (well, not usually...and if they do they probably weren't worth the energy of worrying about.) You don't get fired over email. You don't find out someone is sick or hurt in an email. This is probably why I hate the phone and prefer to email as much as possible.

Even if it's a stupid forward or chain email, it's typically not going to contain bad news. What you may get is pictures of a new baby, a link to a video of a friend's new home, an itinerary for an upcoming trip, a job offer letter, or just a "what's going on?" message from someone you haven't talked to in a while. Email is just a nice little vehicle for happiness.

If you do get a bad nugget in your email, one click and it's deleted forever. On the other hand, you get to store all your happy messages in one location and go back and read them as much as you like. You can't do that with a phone conversation. And for some reason it just feels easier to say nice things in writing than in person. You can't get trapped in an hour-long email conversation. In fact, the only advantage phone has over email, in my opinion, is you can hang up on telemarketers. Hitting "block recipient" doesn't have the same satisfying smack.

It's easy to see why I prefer email over the phone any day.