Editor replies to every PR email for a month with 'I love you'

June 30, 2016 2:00 AM

'For an entire month, I decided, I would reply to every single one of my PR emails with the phrase "I love you."' The results are both surprising and delightful.
posted by nerdfish (54 comments total)

Slow clap.
posted by gingerest at 2:10 AM on June 30, 2016

I love this.
posted by chavenet at 2:24 AM on June 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Now try a month of "I hate you."
posted by Pendragon at 2:48 AM on June 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah, just wanted to say, that telephone seller from "Microsoft" certainly heard something else from me.

Maybe I can improve my style...
posted by Namlit at 2:54 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

At my current job, for 10 years, all of my emails have ended with "Thank you, ... ".

I don't remember anyone ever commenting. But it seems a good thing to do anyway.
posted by jefflowrey at 3:53 AM on June 30, 2016

I end my emails with "You will be allowed to live and serve in my Empire of Blood." It really improves morale, I find. Except among the Wraiths, who gripe about the "live" part, but you know Wraiths; there is no pleasing them.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:57 AM on June 30, 2016 [45 favorites]

Once in the heat of a rec league soccer game, I told another guy I loved him.

It was after a bit of a tussle over the ball, which ended with him angrily kicking the back of my legs with his cleats. When the ref gave him the yellow card he deserved, he was very vocal in his anger and needed to be restrained by a teammate.

I thought, you know, omnia vincit amor, so I told him I loved him.

"What?"

"I said I love you, okay?"

Then what he said was an assumption about my sexuality I'd rather not repeat. I think you can fill in the blanks.

So I said, "I meant in a Gandhi sort of way. I hadn't really considered what you're suggesting."

He broke free of his teammate and took a swing at me, so the ref kicked him out of the game and maybe suspended him for a game or two, story's over.

I'm such a dick.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 4:17 AM on June 30, 2016 [130 favorites]

Reading the article, I kept thinking of the horrible replies this experiment would have produced had he been a woman. That kind of ruined it for me.
posted by ryanrs at 4:26 AM on June 30, 2016 [40 favorites]

I love this guy!
posted by romados at 4:37 AM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

The weird part of this for me is when he tries to explain people ignoring the "I love you" and comes up with:

This could mean one of a number of things:
1. They assumed I was someone who ended all emails with "I love you";
2. They thought I had genuinely fallen in love with them and were deciding to ignore the incredibly weird situation;
3. They hadn't actually read those three little words;
4. They knew they were involved in some kind of prank and didn't want to rise to the bait.

Because, I mean, it is a thing that happens for a man to cast out emotional oversharing in the direction of the nearest female acquaintance or business associate in the hope of getting a girlfriend or getting laid. If I were on the receiving end of an "I love you," I wouldn't think that's what this was - but I'd wonder. Because it's strange to get an "I love you" from a stranger, but weird misguided flirting is not at all as rare as it ought to be. To be clear, I definitely wouldn't take it as a sincere declaration of love. But I'd definitely ignore it.

(And I'm definitely not saying it was any kind of harassment for him to do this! It was kind of cute and charming and funny and somehow still in that Shroedinger's zone where you have to watch out if you're on the receiving end, just in case.)
posted by Jeanne at 4:59 AM on June 30, 2016 [8 favorites]

5. I'll ignore it because he must have accidentally written I love you out of habit like that time I accidentally said it to my friend as I hung up and when I put an X at the end of a text to my boss and I can't be the only muppet who does this kind of thing surely
posted by billiebee at 5:15 AM on June 30, 2016 [35 favorites]

I love all of you.
Best,
cichlid ceilidh
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 5:26 AM on June 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

I end my emails with, "Have a nice day" because everyone, including the people I actively dislike, should have a nice day. It may not make them feel any better, but it makes me feel better.
posted by mfu at 5:28 AM on June 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

Accidentally telling people I love them in inappropriate settings is one of my deep fears, I've felt myself come close many times.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:28 AM on June 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

"The blue one is called The Frenchman"
posted by middleclasstool at 5:51 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I had a job half my life ago at a small jewelry store in Missouri. Fairly tight-knit staff. Everyone more or less got along. Someone, I'm not sure who, got in the habit of doing a little musical "love youuuuuu" at the end of every conversation and it spread:

"Does this ring shank look like it'll hold up?"
"No, and remember that's an emerald and won't take the heat, so add an unset/reset charge to the reshank."
"Okay, love youuuuuuu"
"Love youuuuuuu"

After just a few months of this, the musicality of it started to fade, and the vowels got a little less ironically drawn out. One day, the sincere pronoun "I" was pre-pended to it.

Can I have Saturday off? No, sorry, Chuck's already off. Okay, I love you. I love you too.

And it continued like that, in earnest, for years until that staff broke up.

There's a group of three salesmen out of that staff that I'm still friends with to this day. Two are in different cities in Missouri, I'm in Arkansas, and one is way the hell in upstate New York. We're still in touch, and we still say "I love you". I've occasionally kissed them on the cheek when hugging hello or goodbye at meetups, something I never do with guys, and they never remarked it or seemed embarrassed.

It's quite a thing, how something went as an "ironic" conversational tic to an earnest declaration of feeling. Stupid social contract garbage bullshit made us feel like we had to wrap it in humor until it got so normalized that we felt comfortable laying it out there. And it is stupid, because we all clearly needed it so badly, but connections like that are like water. You let it stand long enough, it'll find the cracks to seep into. If it doesn't evaporate first.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:09 AM on June 30, 2016 [126 favorites]

I love you too, cichlid ceilidh
posted by little_dog_laughing at 6:21 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Christ, what an arsehole. I mean, sure, accidentally on the phone, where you hope that your nice colleague will pretend they didn't hear it? But as a prank? I have two problems with it - firstly, I spend hours sometimes trying to interpret what neurotypicals say in text messages. What a waste of precious thinking time. Secondly, for some of us, those words are precious and rare. I mean, fuck it, I get misty-eyed at cranky old people holding hands, probably to prevent unplanned impulse purchases than from any real sort of affection. I think pranks are best played on people you know well enough to know they won't mind. But I don't like funniest home videos either. I think there's a kind of mean spiritedness to laughing at people. Maybe because it's happened a lot to me. You get to the point where you go, well fuck, seems like no matter rigidly I plan my behaviour and interaction, someone is going to find me ridiculous enough to laugh at or make fun of. Bit tired of being the butt of jokes, not being taken seriously, so I'm only going to interact when I have to.

(I know I over-reacted but random, confusing phrases in business correspondence do cause me great anxiety.)
posted by b33j at 6:34 AM on June 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

[...] you know Wraiths; there is no pleasing them.

Flagged for blatant Wraithism.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:40 AM on June 30, 2016 [14 favorites]

Christ, what an arsehole.

Flagged because I love you.
posted by bondcliff at 6:42 AM on June 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

Had a colleague in an email, after a sort of nasty back and forth, write, "I don't like you much, but I do still love you." Then, within seconds, a second email came my way with simply, "Like a brother that is."

For several years, I referred to him as Brother Steve.
posted by AugustWest at 6:50 AM on June 30, 2016 [15 favorites]

> Christ, what an arsehole.

I kind of agree, though I don't feel as strongly about it. This is the kind of thing it's fun to think about but stupid to actually do. You're basically treating other people as experimental rats. Just answer the damn e-mail.
posted by languagehat at 6:52 AM on June 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

While some of the responses are pretty funny I'd like this a lot more if they weren't business emails to strangers. I'd love to do this with a targeted group at my office to see what happens but I've had to sit with counsel and redact emails and I don't want to explain a bunch of this if there's a FOIA request.

I might think about doing this with some of the emails I get from recruiters that I almost never respond to but then they'd just start sending me more email.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 7:01 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Flagged for poor spelling. In this decade it's

I ❤️ U
posted by adept256 at 7:05 AM on June 30, 2016

I think it is easy to think he is just being a jerk if you don't get a lot of PR emails.

But PR emails are not normal emails. They are slightly curated spam, except sometimes spam has an unsubscribe button, which PR emails never do. One journalist I follow on Twitter shares PR email gems, because they are sent to anyone and everyone who might be remotely related to the media, but without any context or useful info or knowledge of what publications actually publish. She writes about abortion rights, but then she gets PR emails from people sending her info about pro-life garbage, because they are just sending out a barrage of messages to people without paying attention to who those people actually are, or where they actually work.

Anyway, PR email is a specific and very irritating genre. Him deciding make the interaction weirder (and some people ignoring it, and some people choosing to engage) is not the same as him responding this way to emails that were sent specifically to him.

Also, Michael the PR guy is my favorite.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:42 AM on June 30, 2016 [29 favorites]

For some reason, before I clicked on it, I was imagining all the PR emails coming from men (entrenched sexism! My heavens. The surgeon was his mother!). When I got into the article and realized that of course many of these emails would be coming from women, it started to seem at least potentially creepy and unpleasant, and at best kind of juvenile.
posted by not that girl at 7:52 AM on June 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

I think it is easy to think he is just being a jerk if you don't get a lot of PR emails.

Oh god yes. I used to be a trade journalist. I wrote a nine-page biweekly newsletter (subscriber supported, no ads) about esoteric subsectors of the telecommunications industry. (And no, this is not a viable business model anymore. The company I worked for was the largest trade newsletter publisher in the world at the time. I think they do trade shows now?)

So I was the worst possible media outlet to pitch, unless maybe you developed a very, very specific kind of telephone switching software. (Actually here, just read this and get back to me.)

And yet I got pitched shit that you would not believe. I was invited, repeatedly, to cover model train shows at Holiday Inns across the Midwest.

I was sent synopses of vanity published novels by people whose first language was not English. A favorite was the one about how the Russians started giving us shit about the Super Bowl and how it couldn't be the world championship of football because it was just American teams. Then they made their own team of Evil Communist SuperBeings and challenged the NFL. The whole thing was pretty much Rocky IV except with football.

Oh, there was also this one, from the William McGonagall of the nautical disaster novel! (I can't believe I actually found it.)

I was sent samples of things, usually cheap things that would fit in an envelope, like sample beer cozies or magic cloths for cleaning things... magically, I guess.

After a while, you really, really get sick of it. I mean I was really really obviously not editing any kind of general interest publication. It was so esoteric it was practically invisible. And yet I got bombarded by idiots all. the. time. So I'm actually impressed by his restraint in doing something sweetly amusing. I would have been tempted to do something much less cute.
posted by Naberius at 8:04 AM on June 30, 2016 [16 favorites]

HOW THE HELL DO YOU USE THE BLUE ONE?!?!
posted by slkinsey at 8:44 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's a group of three salesmen out of that staff that I'm still friends with to this day. Two are in different cities in Missouri, I'm in Arkansas, and one is way the hell in upstate New York. We're still in touch, and we still say "I love you".

This lovely anecdote immediately embedded the What a Wonderful World earworm.

I see friends shakin' hands
Sayin', "How do you do?"
They're really sayin'
"I love you"

posted by Drastic at 8:47 AM on June 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

One Love,
Soda Pop.
posted by soda pop at 8:48 AM on June 30, 2016

Dear nerdfish,

Wow, thank you so much for this hilarious post. I love giggling before I even get out of bed. It's the best way to start the day. Did you know that nerdfish autocorrects to Meredith?

I love you.
All the best,
meemzi
posted by meemzi at 9:11 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

The problem with PR is that many clients buy it by the pound. Because it is so difficult to "place" "content" in actual, editorial-based outlets and often hard to measure the results of PR, agencies get graded on effort. When I was still a journalist I spent years drowning under waves of inappropriate press releases and wildly off-topic pitches. And no amount of polite, official info for PR professionals cut down on the deluge. It wasn't their fault, I wasn't paying their salaries. That was being paid by idiot clients who didn't understand the difference between effective PR and time-wasting business spam. On the flipside, there is no shortage of arrogance among media types, whom I've seen be super rude to both colleagues and PR people. As pranks go, this one seems fairly harmless to me. I'm glad that Michael gave as good as he got. More than anything, I'm glad this got posted so we could hear midfleclasstool's great story. Thanks for sharing it!
posted by Bella Donna at 9:19 AM on June 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

I kept thinking of the horrible replies this experiment would have produced had he been a woman. That kind of ruined it for me.

Yeah, I was thinking of what it'd be like to receive these emails, as a woman. Maybe, it'd feel less hilarious than sinister.

(I liked how Sophie handled it, very English, imo)
posted by cotton dress sock at 9:41 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

How did the blue one work out though?

asking for a friend.
posted by sldownard at 9:45 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm as big a fan of Puerto Rico as anybody, but this seems like a weird thing to do.
posted by koeselitz at 9:50 AM on June 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Flagged for poor spelling. In this decade it's

I ❤️ U

Are we done with <3? I kind of liked <3.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:55 AM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Pronounced "lessthanthree," of course.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:56 AM on June 30, 2016

For real though I'm fascinated by the social differences in my Twitter/FB friend circle between

• hitting the "like"/"love" button on a post
• typing "<3" in a reply
• typing "love you"
• typing "I love you"

Is there some kind of mail-order grad student catalog where I can send away for a linguistic anthropologist to come study us?
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:59 AM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Accidentally telling people I love them in inappropriate settings is one of my deep fears, I've felt myself come close many times.

Since I always end phone calls with family and friends with "love you" I just *knew* that one day I was going to do it at work. What I was not expecting was that I would do it on a conference call with 35 engineers. What I REALLY didn't expect was that one of the other engineers would reply just as absentmindedly, "Love you too, honey, talk to you later." *click*  It was fucking AWESOME.
posted by barchan at 10:14 AM on June 30, 2016 [68 favorites]

I have been on both sides of the PR/journalism fence throughout my career (currently on the PR side), so I'm sympathetic both to the thankless job of media relations and the acute irritation of the ill-pitched reporter.

In January I shut down a publication I'd run since 2003, and began replying to pitches with an email letting folks know they could and should remove me from their media lists. Nine times out of 10 I get no response at all, which is fine. But what I find amazing is how many PR pros apparently aren't even reading my replies -- as evidenced by their continued pitch emails and the follow-ups to their pitches. It makes me wonder whether they'd have noticed if I said I wanted to cover their news item, or if that too would have fallen on deaf ears.

I wonder how many of their clients know what a lazy job they're doing. If it were me, I'd fire them.
posted by me3dia at 11:12 AM on June 30, 2016

Ehhhhh... not gonna lie, this made me uncomfortable. I'm not really into the idea of conducting social experiments on people who haven't opted in. And as a woman, getting a random "I love you" from a man would be more a cause for concern than whimsical appreciation.

PR requests might be annoying or whatever, but they are still sent by real, live people just trying to get through their workday with a minimum of fuckery and hopefully without borderline sexual harassment from a rando.
posted by delight at 11:30 AM on June 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Although he is doing it deliberately and thus it's not the same, the article made me think of this Ask A Manager thread, I accidentally hugged the CEO. The true confessions in the comments are priceless. Now I know I'm not the only one who has had to go back and erase "Love, Me" out of a sign off on a work email. (Thank God I've never actually hit send without noticing it.)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:27 PM on June 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

re: the blue one... I think you put your dick in it.
posted by palomar at 1:01 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

or maybe not? idk. i'm so tired. i love you.
posted by palomar at 1:01 PM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Related: Accidentally calling your teacher "mom" in elementary school?
posted by ITheCosmos at 2:00 PM on June 30, 2016 [5 favorites]

This is a great story, and pretty funny. This kind of thing is powerful, though, and I think it's because innately we want to love and be heard that we are loved.

When I was growing up, all I knew was that my family said "I love you" a lot, and my grandparents and extended family did, as well. So I would go to see my grandma, aunts, and uncles on holidays, and it was genuinely affectionate. Always hugs upon greeting, and "I love yous" on goodbyes. As I think back on it, it had a definite effect on me growing up. Because of the openness, it's been easy to talk about my emotions and be genuinely affirming in my family and extended relationships, because of the example that was set.

A few years ago, I was sitting with my grandmother, just shooting the breeze about family history. My grandmother said, "You know, we haven't always hugged and said that we love each other."

Really?

"Yes, when your grandfather and i were married, we didn't show the kids that kind of affection, and we didn't grow up in families where it happened, either."

Interesting. When did it start to happen?

"When your father went through a time of personal and spiritual growth, he started hugging people when he saw them and telling them that he loved them. After awhile, it was just the sort of thing that we did."

It sort of blew my mind, as I thought my immediate family got it from their families, but nope. It worked totally in reverse. My mom's family, too, was full of dysfunction, the daughter of an alcoholic and enabler, and emotionally pretty naturally distant. However, I grew up hearing "I love you" from her a lot, too, and also her mom (my grandmother, who had no shortage of hard words for my mother growing up). Upon further investigation, my dad seems to have singlehandedly changed the emotional climate on both sides of my family by sheer acts of genuine love and affection, with no shame.

Shortly after, I mentioned this to my dad, and his response was "Huh, I guess I did start doing that." I think this kind of thing works especially well with a good dose of modesty, too.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:08 PM on June 30, 2016 [39 favorites]

Ya, the gender implications kind of put me off too. I work in a heavily female l-dominated industry and I have thrown "I love yous" and hugs to co-workers for decades now (including as an email sign-off, works especially well while having a perfectly polite difference of opinion over email. We also use emojis multiple times in all emails, including to clients and vendors). I'm comfortable doing it with my male colleagues simply because by dent of remaining in the industry they are cool with their emotions. I would not feel comfortable if there were more men around though; too many men don't understand declarations of platonic love (whereas all my lesbian coworkers do). A shame for those men.
posted by saucysault at 4:46 PM on June 30, 2016

I love this a lot more then "have a blessed day."
posted by soakimbo at 7:43 PM on June 30, 2016

I love all of you.
Best,

I love you all!
Better,
posted by krinklyfig at 2:51 AM on July 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think it might have been interesting if he said, "You like me." "I love you" could be an accident, but not "You like me."
posted by krinklyfig at 3:00 AM on July 1, 2016

My son has a very creepy toy dog that proclaims "I'm your best friend!". That would also be an interesting alternative.
posted by betsybetsy at 4:38 AM on July 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I love this a lot more then "have a blessed day."

This is one of those intent-doesn't-matter-as-much-as-effect things. I think that's intended to come from an I-love-you-ish place but instead has the effect of dumping that person's religion into your world unbidden while cross-referencing that messed up prosperity theology bullshit somewhere on the spectrum from Dave Ramsey to Kreflo Dollar.

This morning I was very lucky and caught my son before he might have trashed our kinda-pricey coffee maker. The tank was full of brown water. He'd poured in water mixed with old coffee that we'd forgotten to clean out of the carafe. But he's on this tear lately where he wants to make us all breakfast as a special service to the family. It's sweet, if tinged with dogged insistence that this will happen, dammit. So we had a talk about learning to cook that was peppered with encouragement and praise so he didn't feel discouraged or stupid.

So this is how I relate to "have a blessed day": the person means well, they're trying to foster good will, but there's a whole lot of stuff that they flat-out do not know that they don't know. Even as it irks me, I try to remember that they just want to make breakfast for the family and I have to be careful when and how and if I correct them. 99% of the time I just flash a smile that I hope doesn't look insincere.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:16 AM on July 1, 2016

I know men who frequently say "I love you" to people they know well enough that everyone involved is aware that it's platonic, and it's great. It helps me be a little more open with my emotions and with appreciating others.

Doing this over email, with complete strangers, reminds me too much of Vi Hart's video about Orlando, with the endless scroll through "marry me" youtube messages. Between the author's complete failure to mention gender dynamics and some of his commentary ("ANITA, ANITA, I WANTED TO MEET YA.") it comes off as a half-bakes sort of "wouldn't this be cool?" experiment, with no thought to how it would affect others.
posted by sibilatorix at 8:49 AM on July 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

barchan, what a wonderful story!

hurdy gurdy girl, thank you so much for that Ask A Manager link. My favorite comments:

"...The script was written months in advance, vetted by marketers, lawyers, doctors, etc. It was not unheard of to go through 50-60 drafts...."

"That reminds me of the time that I called somebody Jessica for like a month...."

"Also, when my mom was on her last job search, she accidentally sent an email meant for her therapist, about the interview she just had, to the hiring manager...." [this is the one that actually sped up my heart rate and breathing when I read it]

"I do apologise, but I appear to keep saying the word cheese"

"Why do you call me 'Trish'?"

"...I realized after that it was his job to get the crowd to stand back from the road, but his arm motions looked like he was going in for a hug..."

a very literal phone greeting
posted by brainwane at 11:07 AM on July 2, 2016 [3 favorites]