Cyber Romance Explored

Inhibitions that normally go hand in hand with visual contact somehow seem to disappear quickly in online exchanges.

Firstly you must realize internet communication is itself part of a social revolution with a powerful transformative effect on interpersonal relationships in general and gender relations in particular. And one of the primary elements in that social revolution is a dramatic increase in direct, unmediated social contact between the sexes. Who knows how to deal with that gracefully?

Oh how quickly we forget that nobody ever had this much access to the opposite sex before! Except for sultans and pashas and kings and such folks, of course. Until very recently, regular humans (99.999% of us) operated under pretty severe constraints when it came to approaching each other on an intimate basis.

The internet experience represents the ultimate (thus far) in certain social freedoms.

Email to email, there is no chaperone, no human buffer, no herd protection, no dour village censor, no institutional social engineering to guide us. When men and women face each other, naked monitor to naked monitor, there are no little social turnstiles to sort out boundaries and safe pathways for us.

We just gotta do it ourselves. And therein lies the challenge that makes it a social revolution in the first place.

Verbal expression and self-revelation become much freer much faster in online exchanges . . . the boundaries between people's thoughts quickly become very permeable.

The biggest deal about making intimate connections on the internet is that historically humans - particularly men and women - have recognized their intimacy via stages of physical proximity. The internet has changed that.

The platonic glories of penpals aside, it has always pretty much been true that you had to see someone in the flesh before you developed any genuine desire or hope of real intimacy with them.

Naturally, everyone still wants to know what everyone else looks like, and sooner rather than later. That has not changed. But internet social life demonstrates that it is not necessary to see someone in order to begin to feel something for them. And feelings of all kinds come thick and fast and hard in online correspondence, particularly in the Man/Woman Issue Soup.

In some way, singles making social contact on the web are able to bypass many of the inhibitory boundaries that normally go hand in hand with visual contact.

The specific boundaries imposed by physical self-consciousness and perceived social hierarchy and role enactments seem to vanish in online encounters. And since those forces are primary governors of verbal expression, self-revelation (a big component in establishing intimacy) is much closer to the surface in online relationships than in face-to-face encounters. Even when people are not consciously intending to self-reveal.

Rare familiarity seems to develop rapidly in Cyberspace and in Cyber Courtship. People say things to one another in chatrooms they would never mention to a new acquaintance at a party or in a
bar. In fact, people say a lot of "stuff" online right away. We assume the entitlement to talk (write) with familiarity almost immediately.

This is stream of consciousness relating like the world has never seen: we cut syntax corners we were not allowed to question in nursery school and yet we cannot resist those penetrating expressions of our own opinions. And our own feelings. Great gushets of emotion come roaring down those transistors. Promiscuous flattery flies through the wires, bruised feelings are broadcast in a flash. Free-floating romance can overwhelm you in an instant. And Sex is in the faster-than-lightening pulse of electrons.

Man-Oh-Man! Making a close connection online can feel like the stiffest hit of psychic intimacy you have ever experienced! And it is harder to avoid than to attract. Thereby reversing the normal poles of experience for just about all of us.

At the very least, a little cruising and chatroom socializing will prove to every man that there is not a shortage of women in the world . . . and to every woman that there is not a shortage of flattery in the world. You can practically call them both up on command.

The internet dynamics strrrrreeetch interpersonal structures, then create new ones and twist them around like taffy.

So it does seem boundless and unboundaried sometimes. It seems that way because in relationships which begin online, we are postponing, sometimes indefinitely, the required negotiation of physical space which is now and has always been a Great Big Deal for men and women.

Now that we don't have to look at one another in order to make contact, we have also been able to sweep away a lot of stressful stuff that usually makes women hard to approach and makes men's attentions hard to receive easily.

Online introductions and courtships, at least as a beginning, offer single men and women the possibility of really learning how to manage internal, psychic boundaries in developing intimate attachments. This has created a truly revolutionary stimulant for more sensitive and direct emotional intimacy. How wonderful!

As long as we don't forget that the physical boundaries still have to be dealt with, we might as well relax and enjoy a completely new experience for mating humans: the challenge and possibility of putting your real Self on the line first . . . and of negotiating delicate private boundaries in conceptual space before we have to do the age-old boundary dances in physical space.