Posted by Larry Hoover on May 29, 2006, at 8:45:39
.....when you develop feelings for someone you've never met, except in an online context?
Like, if I was interested in somebody in real life, I'd ask for a "coffee date" or something like, and sit down and get to the getting to know thing.
But, you have this internet reality, where you can be intimately involved with someone you haven't the slightest clue what they are really like. I mean, you have the intimacy, and assuming it's all quite truthful and accurate, but you still don't know their vibe. You still don't have any sense of body language, or style, or all of that. If there's that chemistry. Or do you?
Even if you go to voice (i.e. start talking on the phone), you still only have the voice that the telephone is capable of sending. It's perhaps a good representation, or perhaps slightly less good. (I'm using this as an example, merely because I'm told I sound different live, than I do on the phone. A different tonal quality entirely.) But it can never be the same as the real voice. That requires that one is sitting adjacent to the real vocalizer, ya know?
And, because you can't do this coffee date thing, you can get way way along some tangential tracks, without the benefit and support and completeness of knowing how the rest of that person really is.
And, when it hits me, that I'm feeling feelings for someone online, it hits me that we human beings have not evolved as quickly as has our technology. It puts "normal" dating/courting processes on their heads.
It quite messes with me, really, because I am a passionate fellow. And it's out of sequence. It's out of context. Isn't it? I mean, to feel for someone you haven't met?
Or, is it more like falling in love with a pen pal? Which is a really romantic element of stories I've read from e.g. World Wars I and II, by the way. I could read those stories for hours. Of people who got together and got married following the war, knowing already that they were meant for each other. Not needing the other means of communications. Not needing them at all. The knowing didn't need the meeting part.
Thoughts?
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:650037
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/relate/20060511/msgs/650037.html