I think it’s possible to fall in love over the internet, but I’m not sure how often that love can stand up to the fact of a physical meeting. I know that it is easy to fool yourself about both yourself and the other person. Much of what we think we know about the other is fantasy. It’s stuff we make up about them to fill in the missing information.
Fooling ourselves is another story. We have needs and desires, and many times we let those needs and desires drive us to do things we would not do if we were thinking straight. A need for love is very powerful. It makes many a person do very foolish things.
On the other hand, I believe arranged marriages can work. It all depends on the willingness of both parties in the couple to make it work. In a way, internet relationships are like an arranged relationship, except you are doing your own arranging. However, when you do that, you have much more of a vested interest to make the relationship work when you meet in person.
I think there’s something about the internet that can make things move very quickly. I once fell in love with several women over a short period of time. It was driven by an extraordinary amplification of my need for love (caused by bipolar disorder).
I was just reading over transcripts of some conversations I had, and emails written between those women and me. It was crazy! We moved so quickly from an innocent relationship to obsession with each other. In some cases in a matter of days.
I look at that stuff now, and I marvel. I’ve never been any Lothario, and yet, driven by my mania, I became one. At least, online. The women I got involved with also seemed to be driven by this need, so we were just ready to fall in love with each other.
I think the internet makes it much easier for people with similar needs to meet each other. Sometimes, though, these needs can be transitory. My mania is gone and I read these chat transcripts with disbelief, now. I mean, I know that mania can change your personality, but, while I remember being that person, he is so far from who I am now, it just doesn’t make sense.
I’m trying to figure out what I’ve learned from this experience. One lesson is that driven by an extraordinary need, I can do things that are otherwise impossible for me. Another is that people who can meet each others needs find each other on the internet. A third is that when people get caught up with each other, it can be like a “perfect storm” of infatuation. I mean, I was ready to divorce my wife and go and live with these women.
However, there is also a lesson about the role that fantasy plays in online relationships. I was seeing things in these women that, had I been in a normal frame of mind, I would not have trusted. Stories that didn’t add up. I did have (online) friends who told me these stories didn’t add up, and they were right, although in a different way from what they thought at the time. I, of course, did not listen to them.
Now my experience has to be seen in light of the mania I was in at the time. So I don’t know how generalizable my experience is to others. Certainly, infatuations and falling in love are both crazy and manic, just on their own. We suspend our normal powers of reasoning and fall into the magic. Is more of that magic real when you don’t start from a crazy place, as I did? I have to wonder.
When I fall in love normally, I obsess, as do many of us. The woman becomes the center of my world. Nothing seems as important as the object of my obsession. I’m married to one of those women now. And she has been incredibly loyal to me, despite these affairs.
What attracted me to her in the first place was something that would have been impossible over the internet—the touch of her hands. The way that healed me. Online, it’s all in your head. Even if you add phone or video chat, it’s all in your head. You are imagining the presence of this person, and that can have a very powerful effect on you, especially if your imagination is very powerful. But it’s still in your head until you actually experience each others presence.
Another thing about not being in each others presence is that you can promise anything, but not have to come through with it. You may (as I did) totally believe your promises, but all the time it’s just online, you can’t really prove them. I made extraordinary promises—such as being willing to wait on the person hand and foot, like a slave, even if there was nothing in it for me but anxiety. These were promises I would never carry though in reality. They were symbols of how I felt that were only possible when we were not physically together to experience the real feelings involved in everyday life.
And another thing you can do when not in each others presence is make yourself into the perfect lover. Since you aren’t there, you can do all the icky stuff that you might not really want to do in person, but it is easy and clean because you aren’t there. You can describe yourself doing anything. In any situation. You can play fantasy games—bondage, dominance—anything you want, and there are no real world consequences. No pregnancies. No cleaning up afterwards. No bad smells. No real pain. Just the perfection of experience in your head.
Falling in love without meeting each other is certainly possible. However, the meaning of that love is not clear at all. It could easily be something that is only possible in the safe confines of your imagination. It could easily be something that can not stand the exigencies of reality. This is not so different from reality, though. Many fall in love and find that in a year or two, their vision has cleared, and the person is not the person they thought they were. My guess is that online loves include much more fantasy than in person loves. As a result, I think they can fool us more, and that, more often, there is not really a there there.
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