Clicking With Someone Online
— -- In Chicago, love sparks between a college freshman and her online friend of four years who lives in New York City. A year later, and still several states apart, the relationship blossoms. Elsewhere in New York, a wife discovers six computer disks containing 3,000 pages of salacious chat-exchanges between her husband and an unknown Australian woman. Less than a year later, the husband and wife divorce.
For some the Internet is a high-tech Cupid, capable of match-making magic. For others the Net is a tangled web of woe, where wandering eyes lead to love gone bad. But for all, cyberspace offers a relatively new outlet for actively pursuing, or just stumbling into, romance with all its fascinating rhythms and disastrous pitfalls. Exactly what works online is as difficult to put one’s finger on as what works offline, but cyberspace does lock into that ever important part of love: fantasy.
Fantasia OnlineAndrea Norstad, 20, has been dating a man she met through the Net for roughly a year. She hadn’t gone online looking for or even expecting love — it just happened, after a long virtual friendship and unspoken courtship with a fellow Usenet user with whom she had struck up a conversation about Bosnia. For four years, their relationship grew into a solid friendship but it stayed a steady, platonic course largely because both Norstad and her friend recognized some hefty real-life barriers. She was just entering high school, and he was a senior in college.
Norstad says a “firm grip of reality” in cyberspace made a successful pursuit of their romance possible.
“We knew we had an incomplete picture of who we were,” says Norstad. They agreed to “enjoy this friendship of words and when it moves into a different world, we’ll see where it goes from there.”
But along the way, despite their determined romantic sobriety, they recognized the feelings that were developing between them, and a subtextual fantasy began to play itself out. Something they referred to as the “perpetual meta” became a euphemism for the relationship that couldn’t be but that was very much desired. The mere mention or even concerted avoidance of the term during their electronic communications provided a fantastical component to the budding relationship — this thing that they wanted so badly but couldn’t touch — yet.
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