This week’s column:
Don’t Dismiss Online Relationships as Fantasy
Last month, three unrelated stories challenged the idea that internet relationships are just fantasy and therefore less important, less powerful and less real than offline relationships.They aren’t.
First, I read the Wired magazine piece about Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two in New York state. Montgomery invented two alternate identities and got both of them involved online with the 17-year-old girl persona of Mary, a forty-something married woman in West Virginia, whom he met at the games site, Pogo.com. He then became so jealous that she was also seeing his co-worker online, that he shot the guy dead in the parking lot after work.
In real life. Where you can’t just get a snack, go pee and log back in.
3 responses so far ↓
1 cyberkyst // Sep 7, 2007 at 12:15 pm
I really enjoyed that article, thanks! I’m pretty much in agreement with you. Emotions don’t turn on and off like a CPU. And in order to get the most of online environments, a connection is needed. Otherwise you might as well sit at home and play with paperdolls.
2 matt // Sep 7, 2007 at 9:21 pm
I found, just today an online business profile for the Pacific end of a relationship that started online. We havent talked via email in over a year. I havent heard his voice on the phone in two years. We stopped being best friends three years ago the same time sexualities edge grew dull in our relationship. And still I stopped breathing for a second, my mind was running warm with the near feeling of him, realizing that he was doing finally what hes always wanted to do.
It made me glad, extraordinarily sad, hopeful, and lost.
We had been together since 2002, and I have never had a relationship since that has come close to that intensity (partially due to the limerence), support, sex, understanding unwavering dedication. We never hugged on a snowy day in his hometown, or kissed on a summer street in front of his favorite coffee shop, or even shook hands at restaurant.
From journals to IMs, to voice chat programs to phones, to texts, to a relationship that saw us through many of lifes changes we were, and it was real.
Sure enough these 3 year old tears are real that have decided to surface, because the spot that he used to be, is not completely empty, but its not warm anymore.
Ill never have what I did. Theres not another fool crazy enough on this planet to encourage me the way he did to be patient and kind loving and generous in his hours and hours of listening to me sing, recite poetry, play the piano, and attempt to strangle a violin. Those things that I never do for anybody else because its not something Im willing to share to be criticized, analyzed I shared with him. The depth and breadth of the loss of a relationship like this, cannot be really put into words, and I fall so short in attempting here too much like a watercolor, the colors of love are too pale, the lines of his face run — and I forget what we felt like, though the place we used to be still hurts.
This is all very schlocky and not too concrete but who in the hell cares I had a very real relationship. I have a very real ache, and I have a very real hope that one day I will share a snowy street with him, and he will hug me back.
3 VanceXT // Sep 9, 2007 at 7:03 pm
You know, matt’s story brings up an interesting point. I gave up online dating because the potential for bonding is simply too intense (although I don’t mind moving a real life relationship into an online environment.)
Looking back over my relationships that have started online and in real life, real life relationships have a very concrete way of firming up an establishing psychological boundaries that are normal and healthy. You know instinctively what to share when and how because you get visual feedback as to when it is appropriate.
Online, psychological boundaries often turn mushy. From my experience, people tend to open up too quickly and enmesh too entirely. This can be fine, but when you move this situation from online into real life, it can often feel like throwing a 70 mph car from 4th gear into 1st.
When relationships like this go bad, I find (from the admittedly limited spectrum of five or six online->real life relationships I’ve been in or observed) both partners don’t just walk away feeling like they’ve been through a bad breakup, they feel like they’ve been compromised as people, totally shattered in terms of self-esteem not because they were rejected superficially (as often happens in real life), but because their most private psychological workings were the case for rejection. The most heart-wrenching breakups I’ve been in were online to real life relationships that developed too fast online and didn’t work out irl, regardless of who initiated the break-up.
Online relationships, if anything, are more intense and more real. They play to fantasy and disable natural, healthy boundaries.