I’ve been writing for the last two weeks about the breakup. Though cynical and pathetic, writing about the breakup is always a revelation because it’s happened to me a few times. Anyone who came in your life during the past 14 years, from the classmate who no longer responds to your texts, to your spouse who sometimes leaves without a word with too many words, maybe hurt or disturb you. Like you, we have all been through this. Every time we say that we have learned something, that we will not repeat the mistake/madness, but we repeat it because love has a perverse mechanism of installation, every time it seems to you that the love you live in the present is by far the greatest. You forget that you said the same thing to your ex-husband, lover, fiancée, boyfriend or girlfriend, and if you think about it, it’s reasonable to be so because a photo album of a past love can’t be compared to the chemistry that throws us into each other’s arms. And you start over in all known ways. My best-known way is on the net. This is where I really wanted to get to the Internet relations, and I’m not talking about the relationships that have appeared on the matching apps where you enter you find a candidate, two, three. You immediately meet in real with him/her, but of something else, of the love born between two people who write compulsively, from SMS to endless emails, in which you discover yourself entirely in front of the other and discover it with astonishment as if all the madness of such a relationship is the total lack of barriers to reveal yourself, even the pleasure of going deeper and deeper into your knowledge using the other as a pretext or in the invention of another because it is so simple to write and how you would like to be not only as you are. Many would say that we invented this kind of love, love through words, remotely, but it would be wrong. Except for the dynamic matter which is entirely different on the net because of the message sent/received instantly yet the love born and increased in correspondence exists since the world, more precisely since there is a means to exchange, relatively simple, letters. I can think of a few things that I’ve felt every time: the immense, overwhelming desire to meet the other who, paradoxically, perfectly pairs with the dexterity to avoid the encounter in the real. The ability to reveal yourself, create, recreate, invent through words without feeling like you’re lying, the overwhelming feeling that it is love precisely like love in real with all that means including sexual desire prevails so obviously that sometimes you do not even notice that you self-satisfy, thus satisfying the act. Hidden behind a character who writes in the name of someone who usually should be “I” you have freedom that the real does not contain. Say, Mrs H.’s husband dies, but the two of them don’t meet until... Four years to be together, after several unsuccessful attempts to see each other, they’re finally getting married but... And I agree with them. From experience! Because to feel the love on the net and discover it as secure in real is about chance (and luck), and it is not mandatory. I found this most frustratingly after a few of the real love of the net. You fall in love in real (mandatory love of real) with the correspondent on the net with the same probability with which you go to the grocery store and fall in love with the customer in front of you, your new co-worker, your best friend’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin, etc. I discovered with amazement (and pain sometimes) that finding real love on the net is an independent occurrence of how much you loved in words on the net in 500 emails, thousands of text messages, tens of hours of Skype... yes, even the face-to-face on Skype doesn’t provide love in real because your image turned into bits, sent and transformed into an image, not even that’s you really but still a negotiation of two people who want to love more than anything. What does that have to do with breaking up? Has! Because until now I’ve only really broken up with the enormous love on the net that has been clicked and created, and it has told me about the last internet lover confirming substantial traces of truth in the ideas I just wrote to you. But it is not a depressing conclusion, on the contrary, because when you find love in real on the net, I think (I hope) it is the most explosive sensation possible because it has all the characteristics of the beginning of real love plus the dizzying feeling that that person has revealed themselves ultimately, has left you inside the mind and soul. The love that begins is a mystery in full light. Or I’m dreaming, and anyway, that was the last time I loved on the net...
