When embarrassing, shocking, or generally ridiculous things happen in my love life, friends often try to throw a positive spin on the situation. " You should write about it! " say the ones who don’t write much, and so don’t realize that writing about an unsavory event is like living through it again, but this time with magnifying glasses glued to your eyeballs, and the horrifying sensation (usually reserved for dream-life) that you have lost your voice. But even friends who know better, having tried their hands at some other torturous — creative — medium, have deigned to utter the less annoyingly enthusiastic but equally idiotic, " At least you can get a column out of it " after I’ve recounted my latest disaster.

Usually I respond with a smart-ass comment — " Do I look like Sarah Jessica Parker? " — about keeping my love life private until someone gives me really nice shoes and Matthew Broderick, and that I have absolutely no desire to make the juicy details available for public consumption.

And so far, I’ve been successful. The six family members and three friends who’ve read all my columns can vouch that I’ve never allowed my romantic life to contaminate the serious literary confines of this hallowed page. Somehow I’ve managed to embarrass myself by detailing my involvement with glow sticks, mattresses, and Def Leppard’s " Pour Some Sugar on Me " without ever directly mentioning sex, or anyone with whom I could, did, or would like to have it.

But while my writing life has emerged unscathed by the tortures of my love life, the latter has not been so lucky. Lately I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, whereby " frat-boy lexicon " and " doesn’t give good e-mail " have been used as evidence when voting a potential romantic interest off the island. Having guarded against a slow descent into Sex and the City column-writing, I seem to have neglected to keep the dowdy grammarian in me from getting uppity at dinner.

I first noticed the problem when trying to explain to a friend why I didn’t want to go on any more dates with a guy with whom there seemed to be nothing wrong. " It’s just that he says things sometimes — " I stopped here, not having the words or perhaps the shamelessness to continue, but my friend, thinking there was something scandalous or dirty to uncover, was implacable. " I don’t know, " I finally continued. " It’s just that he uses phrases, not platitudes really, just little sayings. Like ‘good times.’ He says ‘good times’ a lot, almost at random. Like, ‘This pasta is really awesome. Good times.’ " My friend gave me the look I perhaps deserved. " Whatever, " I said. " He says it a lot. And sometimes it’s like the number of times he says it is in oppositional correlation to the amount of fun we’re having. Less fun, more ‘good times.’ I don’t think I can go out with him anymore. " And — think what you will — I didn’t.

They don’t tell you this is going to happen. You tell people you are " kind of doing a little writing " and they act like " that’s so creative, " but they don’t tell you that it’s seriously going to get in the way of your ability to go out with someone who responds to an informal yet subtly well-crafted e-mail with " yo. we still on? "

I’d probably feel worse about being a word Nazi if I were the only one, but I’m not. Take, for example, the co-worker who broke up with a girlfriend because she started off most sentences with a proclamation of her honesty — " Frankly, I prefer pizza to pasta " ; " In truth, I have to use the bathroom " — so that he began to wonder if she was lying the rest of the time. Or the friend who gets prickly over the excessive and incorrect use of the seemingly sophisticated (isn’t it French?) term per se. There was also the woman who, after counting her date’s six exclamations of " holy moly! " — holy moly? — in a single evening, couldn’t bring herself to go out with him again.

Scary, I know. But while this is not a phenomenon to which one should readily succumb, it is perhaps an understandable one. If you spend a good bit of your time agonizing over which word is the right word, if you consider that choice — especially in personal e-mail or letter-writing — to be of prime importance in conveying to another person just the thing you are thinking or feeling, it is hard not to bristle when someone tosses out words to you as if they don’t matter much. It’s not an issue of education — I’m not one of those people who gets hot around SAT vocabulary — but of the significance of seemingly insignificant things. Some people get hung up on the way someone smells, or the shape of his ankles; I dig a well-told story, an offhand observation that nails it.

This is not to say that I haven’t considered the perfect irony of possibly ending up with someone who, when going to pluck the right word from the brain shelf, has a tendency to pick not the right one but the one next to it. That’s the kind of thing that always seems to go really well in the movies. But for now, for better or worse, my writerly sensibilities seem to be meddling hopelessly in matters of the heart.

Rebecca Wieder, who, frankly, can’t believe that after swearing never to write about her love life, just did, can be reached at rebezca@juno.com