This past May, a dear friend told me just how much she values the words that make up our e-mail exchanges. The choice of one term over another. Variations. The way phrases are brought together.

When do we choose to economize? When does the content deserve something more richly expansive? Minutely detailed?

An ocean precludes much personal interaction between the two of us, so as a practical matter we must write more than talk. We’re denied all those other non-verbal means of communication that the cliché-mongers insist are at our disposal when face to face.

Further to my disclosures herein of things that separate us, I’ll go a bit further than water and geography. Our cultural viewpoints differ — to the point where our ancestors went to war over politics not too many years ago. Our ages are such that her delightful daughter and I were born in the same year.

Quite significantly, my friend and I are genders apart.

All the sort of stuff that makes the peculiarity of the written word inadequate to the task of healthy relationship advancement, we’re told. “Get it in writing!” has become a phrase of last resort, underscoring distrust. Them’s fightin’ words.

Long before divorce clouds are visible, ostensibly happy marrieds try to convince me that they don’t need words. If they truly “are meant for each other,” they should already click on all points. Or someone has convinced them that love imbues an aftermarket ESP, bridging gaps among couples not initially blessed when the stork first delivered them.

If you say so.

But the perspective I rather prefer in response is the model shown by our Heavenly Father. If we can have real-time dialogues with Him through prayer, why has He further given us His Holy Bible? Or, given that we do, why if we have Proverbs is there any value in the poetry that repeats its succinct counsel so “less efficiently” through many of the stories that precede and follow it?

The answers to these questions give pause to a world committed to bullet-point summaries and communications obsessed with keyword optimization. Electrons race about as lightning-fast couriers for those brief packets of information.

More ironic still, when you slow down to consider how much less these words cost to share in light of how stingy we’ve become with them. No paper, no postage.

My friend and I have discussed this very subject with regard to the letters of her late stepfather, Ian Fleming. Even as his novels were making best-seller lists, he continued to put equal care in what he wrote to many audiences of one. Why? Because the same written words that highlight divides in conflict can also uniquely engage and draw us closer through the intricacies of each fine thread.

That’s why we care to write.

And surely part of why God started the practice.

For good or ill, we write because that act of writing itself conveys more content than the mere words and punctuation.

Don’t let naysayers dominate your historical record.

Dell Deaton is a Christian counselor specializing in divorce (and alternatives), available through independent professional practice since 1983. Contact on www.divorcepastor.com or by phone at (734) 668-2001 in Saline.

Local volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America. Dad, remarried, three dogs. Internationally-recognized expert on Ian Fleming and James Bond watches.

Note: Names and other identifying details are always changed for Divorce Pastor columns to respect, protect privacy.