In Love With Technology

This one is dedicated to all of us who have ever fallen in love over the internet.

My story begins, though, not online, but in an office at a university. It begins with a mistake inspired by a website. A textbook representative researches the professors she will target. She approaches the office of one who does queer work. She comes to his office, but finds me, not him. The connection is electric. But she is on a flight back to New York that very evening. We exchange e-mail; we plan to have coffee the next time she's in town peddling her wares. I expect to see her in months.

A couple of weeks later, I receive a sample textbook. I e-mail to thank her. It's all business--for the first few messages. Then it turns. The e-mails are coy, provocative, sexy. Soon we are e-mailing incessantly. And then comes IM (Instant Messenger, the MSN kind, in this case). Then sleep disappears. Over a four-day period, I have about 5 hours of sleep. We both work in the day and talk non-stop at night. When an internet connection is severed at 5 a.m., she calls all the people with my name in Halifax, even though those sleepy heads are not on our time.

She has a girlfriend, she says. But she can't stop thinking about me. I don't seem to care that there's a girlfriend. I want her. She wants me. Does the girlfriend matter? I'm in love. So is she.

But what makes that possible? She is wonderful, yes. When we see each other in person, it is sublime--in both the blissful and awe-inspiring ways. In other words, it is tantalizing and terrying all at once. At times she cannot deal with the intensity. As exhilirating as the connection is in the space of the present, though, she runs scared. She must go back to the hotel, get behind her computer, where can eliminate her inhibitions. She needs the mediating space of technology.

I still love her. But she's still afraid. She loves the girlfriend and is afraid to leave the security of the relationship. I don't know if their connection is as electric as ours, though I do know it can't be any more intense. But is it our personalities that make the intensity possible or is that intensity facilitated by the structural realities of being online, living in virtual time and space?

I'm never surprised to hear that people fall in love online. It's based in a paradox that enables people to open up in ways they might never have imagined. Connections can be instant in a way that is possible only in person or on the telephone (or perhaps by satellite connection). You can be engaged with another person and get her response almost instantly. There is a particular form of internet time. Emotional barriers can be eliminated because there is always the mediating factor of keyboards and computer screens (webcams if you're lucky--though I've never tried one myself). The text, the web, and the technology makes it possible for two people to have the illusion of total intimacy and immediacy in the sense of time, but not of space. The psychological barriers can come down only because the physical ones are held in abeyance.

It's no wonder people fall in love with the help of the internet. The damned thing is, it's a hell of a lot harder to fall out of love this way, too.

Posted by Bush Whacker at March 10, 2003 10:25 PM