‘You Have Reached . . .’ a Modern Romance : Lifestyles: Telephone answering machines have become a requisite go-between that can help diffuse love’s more awkward moments.

In her latest etiquette book, Letitia Baldrige tells a lovely story in which a lawyer takes a message for a senior partner that covers two pages of a yellow pad. He didn’t mind under the circumstances, he says, because the message was a piece of poetry from a woman his colleague had been pursuing for three years; she was accepting his proposal of marriage.

Guess her suitor didn’t have an answering machine.

For today’s singles, the phone answering machine is a constant third party. It can be a welcome messenger, a crystal ball, even a chaperon, broadcasting incriminating messages from one love interest while you’re entertaining another.

Mute, it is a painful reminder that things are not going as well as hoped.

Leaving a message and waiting for an answer, says one 36-year-old single man in Manhattan, puts you not just on hold, but on “telecommunications cyber space time-warp hold.”

But despite its pitfalls, most singles swear by their phone answering machines.

“The greatest thing about answering machines is they’re like getting mail,” says Nancy Goldberg, 29, a business-development coordinator for a Manhattan ad agency. “It’s like getting mail more than once a day. If someone leaves a message, it’s almost better than getting the person in person. You can hear it over and over again.”

“It makes things easier,” says Ranaan Geberer, a 41-year-old editor of a Brooklyn-based legal newspaper. “Before people had (them), you could keep calling and calling, and they were never there, and if you were not home, they could keep calling, and they were out of luck.”

“It is liberating to single people,” agrees Barbara Feld, a clinical social worker and family therapist in Manhattan, recalling the days of sitting by the phone for fear of missing a call. “People used to do that.”

Today, people often first meet over messages on the machines--especially if they’re being fixed up or responding to a personal ad. Goldberg tells the story of an out-of-state friend whose first impression by phone machine was everything.

“(She was) given her boyfriend’s number by someone else,” says Goldberg, explaining that at first her friend hesitated but then decided to see how he sounded on his message. “She called and he had this piece of music on his answering machine. It was her favorite music. . . . They’ve been living together for two years.”

But judging people by the sound of their voices and the style of their messages isn’t foolproof. “Some people are so uptight they might sound nasty when they’re not at all,” says Baldrige, who was Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House chief of staff and whose most recent book is “Letitia Baldrige’s New Complete Guide to Executive Manners.”

“Others are totally at ease, natural-born hams. . . . They may have all kinds of faults, but they’re really fun to listen to.”

The only way to accurately assess a person, says Baldrige, is to take a chance on a face-to-face meeting. “At a certain moment you have to take a risk in life, not a safety risk but take a risk in spending time with someone,” she says.

OK, so you’ve taken the plunge and had that first date. Now comes the one of the worst aspects of having a phone machine--the waiting game. There’s no more telling yourself that someone couldn’t reach you when that little non-flashing light signals, as one single man put it, “Nobody loves me, every time you walk in.”

A 30-year-old ad saleswoman in Manhattan tells a familiar story. She had one date with a man. He said he’d call on a certain day the next week. He didn’t.

“I was ready to kill him,” she says. “And I figured I would just write him off, because he was undependable. But then the answering machine saved it, because he called the next night. He said he was sorry he hadn’t called.”

In her opinion, getting a message was better than talking to him directly. “He’s not going to hear any disappointment in my voice,” she says. “I don’t have to think, ‘How should I act? Should I sound happy to hear from him? Should I sound annoyed?’ So (the machine) takes away all that. . . . He leaves a message. He explains what happened, and he’s back in the ballgame.”

As for people using the machine to screen calls when they’re at home, Baldrige raises an eyebrow. “I’m against that on principle,” she says. “I think it’s dishonest to make people think you’re not there when you are.”

Better, she says, to learn to deal with calls directly. “Sooner or later, you have to deal with it,” she says. “Just deal with it. Be yourself. Be frank, but be nice. Be kind.”

The other side of the argument is that sometimes you’re not in the mood for conversation. “All of us sometimes don’t want to talk,” says Feld, adding that people don’t have an inherent right to talk to other people whenever they want. “The telephone can be intrusive if you think about it.”

But whether you screen calls or not, everyone agrees that not responding to messages and not calling when you’ve said you would is simply rude.