Is the Internet Good for Love and Friendship?
They met online, where he called himself “Prince of Joy,” and she called herself “Sweetie.” Their real names were Sana and Adnan. Each thought they had found a soul-mate with whom to spend the rest of their lives. They poured their hearts out to each other over their marital troubles. Sana, 27, said, “I was suddenly in love. It was amazing, we seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriages.” Finally, they decided to meet in person, and they discovered that they were married to each other. When it dawned on her what had happened, she said: “I felt so betrayed.” Adnan, 32, said, “I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is the same woman who has not said a nice word to me for years.”
It would be nice to report that there was a happy ending, in which Adnan and Sana discovered Sweetie and Prince of Joy in each other. But alas, Adnan sued Sana for divorce on the ground that she was unfaithful to him in pursuing a relationship with his online persona.5
– Metro News
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Facts are better than dreams. – Winston Churchill
MY SUBJECT IS intimacy, virtual and real. My question is this: “Is the Internet good for love and friendship?” Lovers, we know, are face to face. Friends are side by side. What kinds of “being together” are we fashioning in cyberspace and on our screens?
The subject is daunting. In assessing it, we must contend with the enormous complexity of intimacy itself and also with the surrounding circumstances of modern life, which have already created numerous obstacles to love or friendship of the sort we used to know and many of us still seek. We must contend also with the widely different ways in which people employ the Internet in search of “relationships.” Some use it only as a dating or matchmaking service, for purposes ranging from one-night stands to lasting marriage, while others get in touch with long-lost friends or lovers, to reconnect with times gone by or to rekindle old flames. Some engage in pornography and cybersex, while still others embark on true affairs of the heart in what amounts to an ethereal replacement for the epistolary romances of earlier times. Some Internet Lotharios are serious online predators, dissembling their identities and purposes, while others are openly indulging their wildest fantasies, simply to enjoy as an avatar the adventures or pleasures they do not or cannot know in real life. The possibilities are limitless, the rules nonexistent, and anyone can play.6
To make matters simpler and more manageable for myself, I will concentrate my attention on the more serious and sincere uses of the Internet: people looking for a genuine soulmate with whom to make a life, people seeking genuine and lasting friendship, and people desiring to find love, however we define it, marital or not. Leaving aside the notorious dangers – more prevalent online than off – of insincerity, deliberate deception, and sexual predation, as well as the sordid and revolting practices of pornography and cybersex, I want to assess what the Internet can do in the best cases, for the honest and decent seekers. To be sure, this narrowing of attention ignores the degree to which the more reprehensible uses of the Internet affect the general culture, in turn altering the sensibilities and expectations of all who come browsing for intimacy. As in the popular culture more generally, sewage produced by some will befoul the water drunk by all. But, as the enthusiasts of Internet relationships point out, what you look for and tolerate online is entirely up to you, and there is room for greater individual control and interactivity – but also, let’s be honest, for greater self-enslavement through screen addiction – with the Net than with many other aspects of mass culture.
In considering what the Internet means for love and friendship, I do not contend that its features and effects are utterly novel. On the contrary, the Internet is continuous with the long list of previous innovations that have given us increasingly remote and mediated communication – from the letter, through the telegraph, telephone, and television, to the text-messaging and photo-sending cell phone and Skype. But innovations differing only in degree may still make an enormous difference, sometimes yielding, eventually, a difference in kind. And besides, our failure to recognize the deformations in human intimacy caused by previous innovations should not be used as a reason to welcome the new deformations we might now be embracing.
To consider the meaning of the Internet for love and friendship, one must think first about the latter. If one does not know love or friendship, one will be unable to say whether and how going online helps or hinders. It will be said, not wrongly, that the meanings of love and friendship are, in part, culturally determined, and as culture changes, so do they. Yet I insist that such changes do not touch the heart of the phenomena. We still read with understanding and admiration about the friendship of David and Jonathan, or Jacob’s love for Rachel, or the courtship of Orlando and Rosalind, or the marriage of Kitty and Levin, or Pierre and Natasha.7 My students (over forty years of teaching) and I find much of Aristotle’s analysis of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics to be relevant to our own experience. And regarding the enduring and essential core of eros and philia (and the other two loves), C.S.Lewis’s splendid little book The Four Loves offers accounts that seem to me profoundly true.
Still, for present purposes, I will observe only that relationships of love and relationships of friendship, however defined and notwithstanding the important differences between them, are both associations or conditions of mutual intimacy. To be intimate – from the Latin intimus, “inmost” – is to be very close, familiar, and attached, person to person, by bonds of warm affection and deep communion. Erotic relations generally involve also sexual intimacy, the giving and receiving of bodies, lover and beloved each to each and from the other. My question now becomes: How to think about and assess the new forms of intimacy, erotic or not, that exist on, or are assisted by, the Internet (including, of course, email), intimacies that dwell wholly or partly, or that were merely begun, in cyberspace? What does intimacy mean and become for the virtually intimate?
In one sense of “virtually” – meaning “in effect,” “practically,” “to all intents”; from the Latin virtus, “strength or power” – the virtually intimate are effectively intimate, in the same ways that human beings have always been. In this view, Internet friends and lovers are as good as intimate, whether formally so recognized or not. Many practitioners report enjoying the same pleasures and feeling the same emotions – often with even greater intensity – for their online partners as they do for their “offline” ones. (Note how our lingo now treats “on-line” as the default human condition, and “off-line” – that is, real life – as privative.) On the other hand, we still distinguish “the virtual” from “the real” or “the actual,” and regard the former as a simulacrum, perhaps with some of the same attributes, but very much not the real thing. This view would not deny that “virtual intimacy” is something “real” and really “something”; it only casts doubt on whether it is really intimacy – real love or real friendship. Not to beg the question, we should be open to the possibility that virtual intimacy, although different in kind, could be every bit as good, and good for us, as the real intimacy it simulates.
Not surprisingly, this latter view has many champions: lovers of technique and lovers of novelty always find reasons to exalt whatever is latest, quickest, and most convenient. But these theoretic defenses, which I will shortly consider, pale in comparison to those who are voting with their feet – rather, with their fingers – for intimacies online, and not just for pathetic reasons and sordid pleasures. Clearly, even discounting the contributions of fad and fashion, some widespread human needs, desires, and cravings are leading people to the Net. We must begin therefore by recognizing them and by giving the Internet its due.
Why the Internet? Benefits for the Lonely and Lovelorn
People are lonely. People looking for romance and love cannot easily meet suitable or desirable partners and mates. The alternatives of