IM, or instant messaging is used to contact people from all parts of the world. An IM is a small message that is sent over the web to the target person almost instantly. The message is composed of letters numbers and symbols commonly found in writing and can be capitalized, bold, italicized, or underlined.The fact that you can contact someone over such a large distance opens many doors in a relationship. For one, talking to that many people allows for relationships to flower. Also if you're in a relationship you can talk to someone as if they've never gone.
However, using text to speak is a difficult endeavor. Word meanings are more important and the lack of facial features causes problems for any reader of the messages you send. Emotions can be mixed. A whole word capitalized for emphasis may be taken for a yell or and angry statement. The use of ". . ." as an innocent pause is non-existent because with text we are unable to convey what that pause means. Many people could take that pause as one of many emotions, like regret, hatred, building anger and a simple pause when it may not be.
Over the years human ingenuity has developed many ways of expressing an emotion through text, such as the use of emoticons. Emoticons are certain symbols arranged in a way that simulates a familiar facial expression or object. Sadness :(, Love <3, Yelling :o, are all many examples of the emoticons out there. Along with emoticons, technology has allowed the sending of pictures and even live video over the net to help us express what we are trying to express. Still I can't help but think that in person our words and emotions may be taken completely differently.
In a relationship the emotions you display are extremely important, you wouldn't want your significant other to think you were yelling when you were not. The truth is that the majority of speech is done with the hand gestures and body movements, without these the emotions melt together making it very difficult to distinguish between them. An IM can make or break a relationship through the lack of the displayed emotion. While an IM may be useful, it takes alot of trust and understanding to realize the emotion that the oher is attempting to display. It all depends on how you display what you're feeling in those relationships that matters.