"I Don't Mean To Sound Like A Self-Promoting Prick But…"

By Anna Holmes | June 1, 2009 | 9:00pm

Welcome back to Crap Email From A Dude! We felt it would be fitting to mark the resurrection of our old feature* – written by none other than Moe Tkacik – memorializing the wreckage of botched relations with an email attempt to resurrect…something?…from the wreckage of a monumentally botched relationship.

So: we winced a bit hearing the details of the yearlong courtship of Jared and Maggie, a 36-year-old lawyer and 35-year-old publishing industry person who met at a New Year’s Eve party in 2007 and dove right in to one of those mature relationship-py relationships that involve unabashed public hand-holding and getting up early enough on Sunday to watch the talk shows together and few restaurants that don’t serve respectable beet salad. (Oh also! A week-long vacation in Rome/Florence/etc..) Anyway, the week after their first anniversary they were sitting in a charming little crepe joint in Chelsea when… he dumped her, reader.

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“Are you fucking kidding me with this?” she asked.

“I just don’t think about you when you’re not around,” was his response. That would of course change. But in the meantime Maggie, who is not a psychopath like most of us, maturely ceased all contact, “moved on” and eventually successfully stopped thinking about Jared when he wasn’t around. Until October, when Jared found himself thinking about Maggie sufficiently often to warrant emailing…her coworker Tom! Who had met Jared approximately twice.

——— Forwarded Message
From: Jared Fitzpatrick
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2008 14:45:05 -0700 (PDT)
To:
Subject: Hi Tom

This is Jared Fitzpatrick, the guy who dated Maggie Sellers last year.

I was going through my email addresses and I came across you and I figured this would be a good way to find out how Maggie is doing. Understandably I’m sure she never wants to see or hear from me again. I always felt that you were a standup guy so I trust you to use your best judgment as to whether or not to tell her that I’ve inquired about her. You know, don’t tell her if it would upset her. I’m not looking to get back together with her. I just would like you to tell me if she is doing O.K. I don’t mean to sound like a self-promoting prick but I believe I hurt her badly. I hope she has put it behind her.

And are you doing OK? Married yet? I’m still out there on the prowl and I’m not dating anyone at the moment. If you’d like to go prowling/scamming/trollop hunting sometime just let me know.

Jared

—-

*Just in time for this feature’s two-year anniversary, Moe bothered to register the URL CrapEmailFromADude.com, where she and her partner Georgia Cool will post supplementary analysis, outtakes that never made it to Jezebel for reasons of being too convoluted or grammatically impaired or Moe just being lazy, and sundry other notes from the “field.”