Digital Love

A while back I remember writing something about love. I don't think I've ever posted it anywhere as it was just an essay that came to mind. Now that I look back on it, I was right about a lot of things in that essay that I never stopped to actually think about. That's pretty much me, right there. Writing stuff down and never thinking what exactly I'm trying to say or what I've said.

The essay was basically talking about how people use the term "I love you" too loosely. As a race of beings that need to have some sort of sociality in order to survive, we long to have something closer than close friendships. We yearn to have that one person that belongs to us. Well, not really belong to us, but the person who we can say we share similar feelings with and not just on a sexual level. Though sex is a vital part in some relationships, there are some people that don't thrive on it. The act of just tactile contact in a non-sexual way can be more powerful than any form of sexual innuendo. Holding someone's hand can have more love than getting off on someone.

It's this form of love that seems to have left people in this digital age. With so many forms of communication available to us, we no longer have to go to physical places in order to strike a conversation with a complete stranger. Due to the technological revolution that we call the internet, we have a vast number of places where we are allowed to communicate with not only people who live near us, but also places that we may have never been too or probably never even heard of. However, if you've not heard the name of each major country in your life at least once, I highly recommend that you read a map before you actually start talking on the internet. It might give you a little help as to knowing where the person you're talking to comes from. And it might help you to avoid asking that ice breaker question "So how's the weather there?”

But along with all this communication comes the fact that people will and do fall in love with people whom they start talking to in this digital divide. It's not to say that people don't actually have working relationships on the internet that can still hold strong once people decide that they actually want to meet each other in person. But people who are not experience in what exactly "love" is will fall victim to a trap that is as old as the internet it self.

The internet allows us to throw up a person shield that we can chose to either put up or down. We can create a personality that doesn't have to be real or put our lives out in the digital open to see if we find people that find us interesting. It is at that point when we finally find people who wish to communicate with us and begin some sort of online friendship where we find ourselves the most fragile. Those who are poor judges of character out in the real world will find that the digital world is just as hard if not extremely harder since the only thing that we can see about the person we're talking to is the words on a screen. Even those who have web cams can't be the person they say they are.

Perhaps we take a chance and we get to know these people who find us interesting and, depending on your sexual preference, you find yourself strangely attracted to the person you're talking to. The lines of old start to come into play: "I've never met a person like you before in my life." , "When ever I talk to you I feel so much better." , "I trust you more than I trust anyone I know." , "I can't live without you." (and just when you thought the usually cheesy come-on lines couldn't get any worse, they use the dreaded) "I love you."

Sometimes, and I say sometimes because it doesn't always happen, where people actually say these lines and they turn out to be whole hearted about what they are saying and the friendships do blossom out to be more than just friendships. But for those people who fail to see beyond the shadow or the mask of the person they're talking to, they don't realize what form of attraction they actually have with the person on the other side.

This is not a physical attraction but merely an emotional attraction. People long to be with people who are either like the, different than them, or make them feel something that they've never felt before. This is a vulnerability that everyone has. Even the anti-social socialists in this world have this in their lives. They long to find someone who has the same "God complex" as they do so they can rule the world together. Some people fail to understand this play of emotions and when they finally discover who the person is behind the mask, the person in love is destroyed. Left with a spot in their heart and mind so cold that they either long for a replacement of that feeling with someone else or they build up an anger of hatred for the person who hurt them.

This non-understanding of this emotional attraction has hurt so many people. At some point the attracted person needs to ask themselves, how do I love this person if I can't see them or touch them?

I used to say that love transcends all boarders and that if love is actually real and is heartfelt, then long distance relationships truly can work. I still believe that even after all that has happened to me in the last few years. Whether it be friendships or relationships between a man and a woman, woman or woman, man or man, it is all the same. If you can't understand what you're feeling for the person on the other computer, you need to step back and learn more about them. A mask is never the real face, it's always to hide something.