“Never before had he experienced such… such sensations, or felt so completely swamped by on-line emotion. An endless cycle of sending, receiving, back and forth, in and out. He didn’t know what in the name of heaven was happening to him. And what’s more, he didn’t care…”
Falling in love with someone you’ve never met who lives 10,000 miles away, well – that’s pretty freaky, isn’t it? Whatever happened to physical chemistry? Love at first sight? That instant thunderbolt that changes your life forever? How are you going to exchange doleful sweet nothings? Via a crackly time-delayed Net phone? And what are you going to say when your Mum asks: “What’s his name, dear?” “Ummm, 100535436.compuserve.com.” It doesn’t really add up. Which reminds me – there’s no way of eyeing up his car, taste in clothing and abode, so it’s impossible to gauge his bank balance. That’s no way to play safe during these risky times.
Frolicking in the park, gambolling through buttercup-strewn fields… none of these are going to happen without bucketloads of video conferencing gear, batteries and mobile laptops. And then there’s time-zone differences and…
Well, UK student Luke H, 22, emailed me about a competition I was running in .net which had a prize of 50 bottles of Guarana energy pills and gave me a lovelorn reason why he needed them. It started like this:
Subject: Energy pills competition
From: Luke
Date: 23 August
The reason I’ll need the Guarana energy pills is that in a couple of months’ time I’ll be going to New York to visit my IRC* [IRC is Internet Relay Chat - a forum for sending text messages in real time] lover and I shall need to keep the British end up!
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I asked a few questions.
27 August
I’m a regular on IRC in the #hottub channel on the Undernet and I got talking to Jane, 30, from New York. She was very depressed in general – she’d been stood up a few times recently and I know how that sort of thing feels so I stayed up every night cheering her up.
We started to get pretty close and soon we were both just using IRC to talk to each other. She sent me a letter and photo of herself so I sent mine too then phoned her. We both liked each other’s voices, looks and definitely personalities so she invited me over.
I’d just quit my job to do resits at Uni so I didn’t have much money but I’ve just enough to get there and back, so I’ve booked a flight over for the week I have off between my resits and the start of the University’s semester.
I’m pretty well known on #hottub. Some people are pretty jealous of us. All of the regulars know, I think, but we’ve now decided to keep the whole thing pretty quiet due to the unwanted hassle we’re getting.
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10 September
I’ve been causing so much trouble! I’ve been kicked out of #hottub for fighting with Jane in the open channel and now two of the operators have got it in for me and keep kicking me off and banning me for no reason.
I’ve got quite a following from the #hottub, though, and about 30 regulars are slowly defecting to #kazbar to join me. It was amazing seeing so many people shout at the operators at once.
Jane and I have managed to stop fighting, finally. It is really hard talking over IRC as you can’t see each other and it’s too easy to hurt the other person’s feelings, as we both found out. Plus the fact that half the people she talks to tell her to dump me and half the people I talk to tell me to dump her! The amusing thing is that both sides give the same reason – we’re both too possessive of each other, apparently! Heh heh, it’s an insane world! In fact, no it’s not, if it was I’d fit in perfectly.
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18 September
You’re not going to believe this but I decided to go early. I got back from New York on Sunday. Did my knee in climbing the Statue of Liberty. It was quite a tearful farewell but she’s coming here just after Xmas.
We hit it off from the start. It was as if we’d known each other for ages and we should be getting married next year. I didn’t want to rush things so we’re almost engaged (I couldn’t afford a ring), sort of pre-engaged.
Both my parents are in shock, but happy for us. They think it’s quite unusual and can’t understand how we got so close over the Net.
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20 September
Both Jane and I are really stressed out. She was supposed to be coming here for Xmas but neither of us can afford the flight. The cheapest one is £411 pounds! It’s ridiculous how expensive it is to fly at Xmas.
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23 September
Jane and I had a bit of a falling out last night as I was jokingly flirting with another woman. She was married and her husband was there and they didn’t think I did anything wrong but it took over an hour to get Jane talking again. I think she’s OK now but she’s begging me to get her ticket to England booked.
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26 September
Jane and I have finally managed to get a flight to England we can afford so she can be here around Christmas time.
The only problem with that is I have to drive to Heathrow at 1am on 26 December, so I can’t have a single drink of Christmas day.
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24 October
We’ve almost stopped arguing now. The stress of talking to each other over the Net is what’s causing it I hope, because we were fine in real life. By the way, I was sent a present from another woman in the US that I met over IRC! She’s an artist and sculpted some models of a cactus and an angel. Very good detail. She may be coming over to visit me next year but she’s married so it is perfectly platonic.
I’ve started my own channel and it’s already quite popular. It’s called #hotpub. I think this computer stuff is finally driving me insane.
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——————————
11 November
Things have been hell recently.
Jane told me last Wednesday that she only loves me as a friend now and has found someone else on IRC. They have only talked but he told me she is going to refund my tickets to England and use that to pay for her to go to see him instead.
She denies this but admits she was thinking about visiting him instead of me.
Since she told me this I’ve not slept and I’ve only eaten one meal. So far, that’s five sleepless nights. Plus I got the phone bill. I’m a student on £10 a week plus £20 for food and I’ve got a phone bill of £280. Luckily I had £190 put aside, but it’s still a lot. In one week life has turned to hell. Jane hasn’t even given me a reason why she doesn’t love me like she did. She can’t think of one and admits that.
If I don’t get the tickets back it means that I am going to spend Xmas and New Year alone while she spends my Xmas present (the tickets were a present to me from my parents for Xmas and they are going away then too, leaving me here alone)
Sounds fun eh?
Anyways, Jane is emailing me tonight to give me her answer on whether or not she’ll still come as a friend but she says there’s no chance of being my girlfriend.
I’m such a mess because Jane was my first real girlfriend (I tend to be VERY choosy, and alone because of it) and I’m not coping too well right now. I’m even thinking of getting a student loan and visiting a very close friend from IRC (she invited me to live with her! The only problem is that she’s married, but separated, and is 20 years older than me).
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Behind the screens
So what went wrong? Is Jane visiting now, or what? We rang Luke after he’d endured a week of heartbreak. He has been having a run of bad luck lately – within the past four months he’s had his car stolen and three loved ones have died. “I wasn’t able to talk about it before. It’s too painful, “ he says. “I think she’s coming over. She’s not spending the money on visiting that other bloke; he’d just made that up.”
He describes what happened during his visit: “I went over a couple of months early, in September, as I felt I couldn’t wait any longer. We’d decided before that we’d hug when we first met. I could hardly recognise her – she looked completely different from the photo she sent me. She seemed shorter and her hair was a darker colour.”
After the first couple of hours, Luke says they felt relaxed and “everything went really well”. Despite having volunteered to stay in a motel, Jane said he could stay at her place. Surprisingly, Luke says this made him feel nervous. “I felt worried about her safety in the future – would she ask other IRC friends to stay? It seems a bit risky.”
He’d only been there for four days, however, when Jane proposed as they were returning from a pleasant evening out on the town.
“I said, `No, maybe in the future. But definitely not until we’d lived together for a while first.’ She thought it was fate that we’d met, but I don’t believe in fate. Now she’s sure she made a mistake.”
Things got worse when he returned home. “After I’d visited she acted like a different person altogether and kept shouting at me on IRC and flirting with everyone. We started having lots of arguments – I’m a Taurean and she’s a Leo, so they’re signs that tend to have short fuses – and it’s hard to makeup on-line, because you can’t see the other person’s facial expressions and calm down if you’ve said too much. She has also been under a lot of stress lately at the car insurance firm where she works.”
Meanwhile, friends were e-mailing Luke and telling him to dump Jane, because whenever he chatted on IRC to another woman, she’d leap in and start shouting: `WHAT ARE YOU DOING?` But how anyone be sure you’re chatting to another woman on-line? “Usually you can tell by their language,” Luke says. “Men tend to be more abrupt.”
There was some game-playing shenanigans, too. “She gave me what she called a Classic Test in November, when she told me she’d have a bloke she’d met on IRC, but never in person, staying at her house. He’d be sleeping on the couch. I wasn’t happy about it, because it’s a one-room flat, but I trust her, so I said alright. Her friends said my reservations about this arrangement meant I was too possessive.”
IRC enemies also sent Jane faked logs of IRC chats, which described her as being fat and “crap in bed”. “One of my friends won’t even chat with me now,” says Luke. “She just shouts, `Leave me alone, you scare me,’ and puts me on /ignore!”
Surely these incidents would turn a sensitive young man away from the Net for life? “I’ve lost one an a half stone in the last two weeks, since we split up. I’ve been in a right state. But I’m addicted to IRC. I only log on for two hours a day, but I have to chat. If my parents see me using the computer, they say, `You’re on that thing again!’ They don’t want another huge phone bill. But I’ve already made two one-hour calls to Jane. I won’t do that again – she can ring me.
“Sometimes I think I’m just stupid. I tend to go for what I can’t have and am very unlucky in love. She was my first girlfriend, and I can’t believe she’s treated me like this.”
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21 November
Just to let you know it’s definitely over between Jane and I. She netsexed [this is where both parties describe having on-line sex together while they both masturbate] another girl and bloke at the same time and when I sent her an email saying that I’d stick with her even though everyone’s laughing at her now, she told me to go away. As soon as I get my tickets back from her I don’t even want to see her again!”
I rang Luke’s Mum and asked what she thought about her son’s modern form of courtship and its heartbreaking ending. “It seemed a bit strange at first,” she says. “In my day, we used to hang out at the fish and chip shop on Saturday nights, and if a boy threw a chip in your direction, it was a sure sign he liked you.” Messy! So how would you explain those greasy stains to your parents…?
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But this story didn’t end there. Six months later I received an irate email from Jane, 30, who’d objected to having her name changed and face blacked out in the article.
“I’ve been a regular in the channel #hottub for almost two years, and I still use it,” Jane wrote. “It’s fun and I have a few friends I communicate with on a regular basis. I met Luke, and he was the sort of person who was moody and self-pitying when no one would talk to him. Because I’m such a good-hearted person, I talked with him. We discovered we had things in common, like the X-Files, our passion for reading, video games and we’re both very stubborn.
“I continued to talk with him on a regular basis. Luke said he had plans to spend a month travelling across the US to visit #hottub pals. I jokingly told him to stop by New York to see me. He said he would, but then ultimately his month long journey turned into a week long stay with me. Which I didn’t mind. We got along great. I had taken a week off from work, using up ALL of my vacation time for Luke.
“I got drunk one night and talked about marriage. But then a couple weeks after he had returned to the UK I realised we didn’t know each other well enough. Then I started to get to know him and thought he was immature, possessive, vindictive and jealous. He constantly flipped out when I talked to other guys. He started to take IRC a little too seriously and was getting drunk on a daily basis and threatening suicide. Some of his #hotpub regulars began drifting off into other channels which upset him greatly. Of course I was always there with a kind word.
“The last straw came when he started sending harassing emails after I called things off and cancelled my Christmas plans with him. I ultimately agreed to go to England, but just as a friend. I ran into a few problems [Luke claimed these included drink-driving offenses and she had to perform community service] and when the holidays came around I couldn’t get the time off work. So instead I went to New York to visit my family for the weekend. I mailed the airline ticket back Luke had sent me… after he threatened to sue.
“While I was gone, Luke sent me more harassing emails. Despite this, I still occasionally talked with Luke because I felt sorry for him. He had a troubled childhood and is a very lonely individual looking for love. He doesn’t fall in love. He’s in love with the idea of love.”
I asked Jane why she had begun netsexing with other people soon after she’d called off the marriage.
“You don’t understand the concept of IRC. It’s all FUN, FUN, FUN. My flirtatious chats sometimes involved netsex, but AFTER Luke and I broke up. And don’t think Luke is Mr Innocent. His crack about netsex being sad made me laugh. He’s had netsex himself, and he’s admitted it, so he’s just as guilty! Of course he didn’t mention the fact he called me every name in the book. Why would I want to go see someone who calls me such filthy names? Since then, we have spoken to one another occasionally on IRC, but that’s as far as it goes.”
But Fate is kind… a couple of months ago Jane met a Canadian bloke at #hottub and now they’re engaged to be married! “So I didn’t feel burnt by my previous IRC experience at all…”
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Michael and Huw also contacted me with their lusty and poignant stories.
“Some years ago, at the same company I work today, I started a little flirting using the company email with a female colleague at one of our remote sites,” Michael explained. “It developed into the equivalent of heavy petting, discussions of my fetish for redheads and lack of underwear, her passion for oral stimulation, and a few exchanges of intimate fantasies which led to some mutually satisfying meetings!
“We are still good friends, though we’re no longer intimate, but getting those emails certainly set my pulse racing and in need of a little ‘personal relief’.
“Another girl I was having an email flirtation with at work ended in a bust up with her boyfriend when he discovered printouts of our conversations in her car, which was most unfortunate.”
Huw gamely engaged in the role-playing fantasy world of CompuServe’s CB Simulator. “My first encounter was a brief but passionate affair,” Huw said. “The lady, `Guinevere’, claimed she had long golden hair, slender arms, endless legs and pert peaches, and after some coaxing weepily explained that she’d been imprisoned in a fortress by an evil tyrant. Being new to the game, I was a little confused, but claimed to be a knight. My call-name hastily changed from Jackal to Lancelot. We exchanged some pleasantries and then I found myself courting her with abandon, proclaiming my love and babbling cocktails of poetry and great rock anthems. Lyrics by Dr Hook were weaved into catchy bits from Eliot and Keats. My mind performed incredible tricks, conjuring the dazzling Guinevere before me so I could almost smell her scented skin. I truly felt as though we were lovers during our brief time together. She whispered sweet nothings and more substantial promises to boot. It didn’t take me long to realise that she wasn’t very much of a lady, nor the blushing virgin she swore. After five minutes I was the one who was blushing as she eloquently peeled off my glistening armour and jumped me in the most breathtaking detail.
“In the aftermath, when the rampant Guinevere ‘vanished into the dawn’ as she put it, I sat dazed, wondering what had hit me.
“I mannishly resolved to forget her and logged back onto the chat-line. Within minutes I was in conversation with an upper-crust Countess from Transylvania who again claimed to be more beautiful than Aphrodite. After a staccato inquiry over my age and height, she asked me whether I was a stable-boy. I indignantly informed her that I was a villainous duke from Austria and she cut me off without a farewell. Even my belated claim that I was indeed a stable-boy couldn’t win her back.
“The next in line was Sasha, who after three minutes metamorphosised from blonde nymphette to a 44-year-old man in leather cap. I hastily retreated, cutting my losses.”
But Huw was hooked, and within a week says he was the “self-proclaimed Tom Jones of the Cyber-Bonk Simulator”. After innumerable one-hour stands, he developed a “deeper” experience with Kala, 22, blond, beautiful, etc, who playing the role of a confectionery saleswoman from Leningrad who spoke like the bonneted women in ‘Pride and Prejudice’. “I courted her patiently, bizarrely talking architecture and of a certain bar in Munich we both knew – I lied to make our meeting seem more special,” Huw recalled. “The reward for this was the promise of another meeting the following day. I have to admit I treated this rendezvous with all the seriousness of a proper date, except I didn’t bother showering or cleaning my teeth. Nevertheless I felt the same anticipation and misgivings. Would she turn up? What would we talk about? Would we get on? Thankfully we did, and met again, and again. After maybe a month she talked of engagement, and the week after that I gave her a cyber-ring. Kala was delighted and became more amorous. A fortnight later we married in the presence of on-line witnesses. And just over a week ago my first son was born – a blue-eyed angel by all accounts, and now Kala’s talking about having a daughter. Of course they don’t exist, but it’s amazing what your imagination can do.
“I don’t feel more responsible now that I’m a cyber-father. Cyberdating carries a lot of the excitement and passion of the real thing, but at least there are no hungry mouths to feed at the end of the day.”
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I personally experienced heartbreak via the Net in 1995 and I was completely pitiful, wearisome and lamentable. This incident occurred during the UK summer party season, so I was endlessly moaning: “My boyf dumped me by e-mail,” loudly at every gathering, and it was a sure conversation stopper. Guaranteed to grab me attention and ensured I was doused with champagne-bucketfuls of sympathy.
The question everyone inevitably asks after you’ve made such an announcement, is: “How long had you been going out together?” Four years and two months. Not that anyone’s counting. Well, I was, as his previous girlf had gone out with him for five years, and I’d been hoping to break that record. Short by only 10 months.
It was all my fault, though. I was itching to travel overseas. He was going to wait, sulking around listening to Leonard Cohen, and keeping the home fires burning. Suffice to say that my primary motivation for buying my computer was to keep in touch with my loved one.
So what is it like being dumped on-line? Well, let me explain, that I wasn’t actually cruelly dumped, it was mutual. Please, quell your scepticism. It only took a couple of months for things to go horribly wrong. Events came to a head when my ex was supposed to move to London too, as planned, after six months. OK, I’m mind-reading now, but I think he was mortified that I hadn’t already rushed back home. I nearly did, too, because it wasn’t easy after living with him for 18 months – he used to whip up gourmet meals, do the shopping, laundry and take out the garbage. Now I was having to do all of those household chores myself, and I didn’t like it one little bit.
Our relationship suddenly chilled. He left some terse messages on the answering machine. I rang. He rang. There were a few abrupt e-mails, tears and pauses over the keyboard, a couple of thanks-for-the-good-times messages and then, within a week, it was all over.
It may have seemed preferable to have conducted this sort of social transaction over the phone, but these kinds of discussions can only really be done in person, or with a Dear John letter. Let’s face it – if you’ve been going out with someone for years and actually like them, it’s difficult to discuss these matters over a scratchy phone line. I’ve never been able to. There were lots of “ums” and “aahs”, “I dunnos”, and “whatever you want to dos”. Neither of us was fluently forthcoming.
The worst aspect was that I was too embarrassed to share the news of the impending personal disaster with my two friendly flatmates, so I valiantly tried to cope with my misery alone. And I’m a terribly self-pitying martyr. Every evening and morning I’d hastily check my e-mail to see whether there was any update on the state of my love life.
You’d think I’d open any messages from my ex-boyf first, but I didn’t because I dreaded the contents. I’d read the others first, checking out the state of the rest of my world, to see how I’d cope if it was about to cave in. And cave in it did. The fateful e-mail (in response to mine which rambled on about being jaded) began something like: “Well, I suppose that’s it. I’m not really surprised – disappointed, yes, but not surprised. It’s not as though our relationship was all sweetness and light.”
And I’d written (unprofoundly): “Four years and this is it. Just a feeling of resignation and inevitability.” Well, that’s a small summary, but, the rest was endless ramblings about the good and bad times, rant, rant rant.
So there you go. It all seems so cut and dried, and being dumped on-line is particularly frustrating because you can’t convey all of those nuances which can be done so much better in person. For example, I could have tried to lure him back by dressing to perfection in a figure-hugging sheath of silk, faked an air of insouciance and pinned him with my mesmerising eyes. He could have taunted me with an acid rejoinder, and heaved a mock sigh as a tiny ironic smile played about his lips. Even with the most comprehensive smiley dictionary, you couldn’t hope to capture the shades of emotion which are transmitted by body language.
The symptoms of heartbreak are universal, though the only on-line difference is an occasional unreal feeling of whether it even happened at all. I’d been mentally steeled for six months of waiting for my ex-boyf and fending off innumerable advances from highly-sexed single men (which didn’t materialise – hey, I was spending most of my spare time on-line, remember?)
Without a physical confrontation, I sometimes forgot we’d even broken off at all, and occasionally I’d still feel like one of those people who was fortunate enough to have love in their life. Otherwise, I’d plummet into feeling sick and having even more acute insomnia than usual, wondering whether I’d ever recover. To mark my one-week anniversary of being single I stayed up alone on a Saturday night at 2.30am and typed an e-mail announcing the break-up to my on-line acquaintances.
Nothing better to do. And nothing to show for it but a clutchful of tear-stained printouts and a massive BT bill.
