Remote Love

"I once confessed to a friend that I was starting to develop feelings for a man I'd never met. She called me crazy. "That would be impossible," she said. This friend of mine happens to be addicted to The Bachelor. Right, so 2 people who've exchanged private & intimate letters cannot fall in love but a man can find his soul-mate from a batch of strangers in 8 weeks time? That makes perfect sense..."

As Sabrina says...


She brings an interesting and very new mode of emotional interaction into sharp relief. Is it possible to feel something for someone who you have not met before?


I say yes. Without doubt.


People can feel empathy, sadness, and other emotions not only for people in crisis in real life but they can also emphasize with characters in a movie. I doubt there is one reader of this blog that has never cried because of a movie they have watched and how the movie's plot has affected a character in the movie. Honestly, if you did not cry at watching Sounder?


So, if such modes of art can induce emotion, than what is stopping us from experiencing like, love, lust, desire, hatred, angst, disgust about another individual whom we have not met in person?


We can and we do. I would not classify that I have fallen in love online but I have definitely fallen in lust. And I will further state that even though I have not fallen in love online I have fallen more in love with someone because of my interaction with them online.


I am certainly not advocating only interacting online. I personally like the sweet messiness of kissing, fucking, sucking, and generally interacting with a real person. But I have also had to accept the compromises of not being with that special someone in person and have accepted and in fact made online interaction a positive and reinforcing aspect of our relationship.

As Sabrina points out how can someone deny the possibility of such an emotional construct existing and be suckered in by the penultimate emotion grabbing media of American network television. Dudes and dudettes, that type of television is about creating remote emotion.


So, would I rather long for some impossible TV network idealization of femininity or the hard and true fastness of my prospective online lover's words to me?


I'll take the naked possibility of that online person over the cookie cutter manufactory of The American Dream TV network realization of what my ideal of feminine beauty and comportment is supposed to be any day.


I have a much more likely chance of actually meeting and being of value to that online person than that representation of ideal reality on TV.