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 crossed your life in the past 14 years—from the classmate who stopped answering your texts to your spouse who sometimes leaves without a word, though their words came in abundance—may have hurt or unsettled you. Like you, we've all been through this. Every time we tell ourselves we've learned something, that we won't repeat the mistake, the madness—but we do, because love has a perverse mechanism of renewal. Each time it seems to you that the love you're living now is by far the greatest. You forget you said the same thing to your ex-husband, lover, fiancée, boyfriend, girlfriend—and if you think about it, it's reasonable to believe it, because no photograph album of a past love can rival the chemistry that throws us into each other's arms. And so you begin again in every conceivable way. My most familiar way is on the net. This is where I really wanted to arrive—at internet relations, and I'm not talking about the kind born from matching apps, where you scroll and find a candidate, two, three, and immediately meet them in person. I mean something else entirely: love born between two people who write compulsively, from texts to endless emails, where you discover yourself completely before the other and discover them with astonishment—as if all the madness of such a relationship springs from the total absence of barriers, the pleasure of going deeper and deeper into knowing them, using the other as a pretext or inventing them anew, because writing is so simple, and you can become not just who you are but who you wish to be. Many would say we invented this kind of love—love through words, from a distance—but that would be wrong. Except for the mechanism, which is entirely different on the net because messages are sent and received instantly; yet love born and nourished through correspondence has existed since the world began, or at least since people found a relatively simple means to exchange—letters. There's something I've felt every time: an immense, overwhelming desire to meet the other, which paradoxically pairs perfectly with the dexterity to avoid the encounter in real life.
The ability to reveal yourself, to create, recreate, invent through words without the sensation of lying—that overwhelming feeling that it is love, precisely like love in reality with everything that entails, including sexual desire, so unmistakable that sometimes you don’t even notice you’re satisfying yourself, thus satisfying the act itself. Hidden behind a character who writes in someone else’s name, in place of the “I” that should naturally be there, you possess a freedom that the real world does not grant.
Take Mrs H.’s husband dying, but the two of them not meeting until… Four years of waiting, after several failed attempts to see each other, before they finally marry but… And I understand them. From experience! Because to feel love online and discover it holds steady in reality—that’s a matter of chance, pure luck, and it’s not guaranteed. I discovered this most painfully after a few instances of what I thought was real love, born online.
You fall in love in the real world (that inevitable, mandatory love of flesh and presence) with an online correspondent with the same probability you’d fall in love with the customer ahead of you at the grocery store, your new coworker, your best friend’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s cousin, et cetera. I discovered, with both amazement and sometimes pain, that finding real love online is entirely independent of how much you loved in words—in five hundred emails, thousands of text messages, tens of hours on Skype… yes, even face-to-face on Skype doesn’t conjure real love, because your image has become pixels, transmitted and transformed into an image, not even truly you, yet still a negotiation between two people desperate to love.
What does this have to do with breaking up? Everything! Because until now I’ve only truly broken up with the enormous love I created and clicked into being online, and it has told me—my last internet lover confirmed it—substantial truths in everything I’ve just written to you. But it’s not a depressing conclusion, quite the opposite, because when you find real love online, I think (I hope) it is the most explosive sensation imaginable, because it carries all the qualities of real love’s beginning plus that vertiginous feeling that this person has finally revealed themselves utterly, has let you inside their mind and soul. The love that begins is mystery laid bare. Or perhaps I’m dreaming, though that was the last time I loved online…