Help! I'm being stalked by an online supermarket that wants a 'relationship

Ocado says: 'It's time to celebrate!' Er, no it isn't … Photograph: Alamy

Call me cold, but lots of people seem to be having relationships with me that I don't feel I am having with them. Cold might not be the right word. But definitely uptight with a fear of intimacy. Yeah, read that – and would have got the T-shirt, but didn't want to go that far. And it's getting worse, for I am increasingly at sea in a world of rampant overfamiliarity.

Only yesterday, some kind of leaflet popped through the door promising to turn me on. From an energy company? Yuck! This was as good as the glossy Valentine's card from a lettings agency that just couldn't wait to get its hands on my property … oooer missus.

Even well-established companies have taken to addressing me as though we were in a serious relationship in which have I been neglectful. Ocado (yes, I get stuff from them delivered to my Islington-upon-Hampstead castle) sends me creepy emails about our "anniversary". "Hasn't time flown? It's time to celebrate." Jeez, I had forgotten the incredible day when I discovered a supermarket delivered. Next time I see the van, I guess I should just propose to it.

The thing is, I haven't paid this anniversary much attention as I am tied up with giving constant feedback to my mobile phone company. Every time I query a bill, I get 27 texts asking me to rate the performance of the person I spoke to. Trouble is, I am still in the middle of rating the venue and bar facilities of a fringe theatre I went to at the weekend.

This constant loop of marketing, consumption and feedback means I rarely have time to talk to my children or anyone else in my stupid offline life. It's pretty exhausting telling everyone exactly how their service can be improved. You can't just say you didn't like an ad on Facebook, you have to explain why. Which reminds me: I must tell TripAdvisor that the hotel in Paris didn't have very good body lotion.

This creeping interactive culture exists partly because of less face-to-face communication. But it is taking the form of intrusive and fake missives that appear to assume we are in a state of quasi-sexual excitement over that most mundane transaction, paying a gas bill.

In publications such as Forbes you can see all sorts of crappy business waffle about "intimate marketing". The key relationship is between customers and brands, and those emotional fires have to keep being stoked. Yikes! Clearly, I have a problem with commitment and sometimes just want to buy something and move on … This, apparently, is shallow and short-lived – exactly what I seek, but then I am a bad person with a transaction mindset when I, and whoever I am buying from, should be thinking about long-term goals.

Such relationships are acted out when you are chatting to someone on the phone who is involving you in a new contract, finding you a special deal, bonding. Building rapport is part of their script. It's not their fault: this is how business is done.

Essentially, this is the globalisation of etiquette premised on the American model. When I waitressed in the US, I soon had to learn that it was about more than getting the food to the table but also providing a one-woman show. In my case, a show that did not resemble being a decent waitress in any way. Americans expect a certain level of service and do not find friendliness suspect.

What we appear to have imported is overfamiliarity without good service: thus, we have to wait in all day to get a boiler repaired while at the same time being bombarded with these strangely personal love notes. My internet provider is emailing me daily about date night at the movies and telling me to get the popcorn in? Obviously I am going to chuck them soon, as another broadband company is promising so much more.

Does any of this stuff work? I only know one person for whom it does and she is having a relationship with a wine club. Aren't most of us flummoxed by this gropetastic marketing?

Spike Jonze's film Her is clever because it is not about the future but about now, and it simply takes personalised intimate marketing to its logical conclusion. The central character falls in love with an operating system that has been tailored to meet his every need and has rifled though all his personal information. It makes him happy, so perhaps I need to loosen up and understand that my value can only be measured by those who sell me stuff, that the bonds I make with companies and supermarkets are deeply important, that the most excitement I can ever crave will come in the form of a discount from someone I never met. Perhaps I just need to work harder on my part of the relationship: you shall know me by my purchases and my purchases alone.

Or I could hope for a let up in this kind of harassment-marketing, and yearn for the days when the nearest I got to a personal message was the annual Christmas card from the Chinese take away: "Happy Christmas Moore."
the guardian Suzanne Moore

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