Online Romance

This Salon article about online attraction is worth your time:

I first met SaltySaber in a dark and dangerous swamp, where he answered my desperate cry for help and rescued me from a gaggle of ruthless ghosts. He slaughtered them effortlessly, with the efficiency and finesse of an experienced warrior. Then, he chivalrously presented me with the spoils.

From that moment on, we were inseparable. We quested together constantly, and he brought his friends along. They were all his church buddies in real life, and together we made a motley crew. Me, a gay secular Jew in Michigan. He and his friends, religious Mormons in Idaho.

But the author — gay and male — is playing a human character in the game who is pretty and slim and female. Seeds of emotional tragedy, yes?

Soon, my femaleness became central to our relationship, and he grew even more thoughtful. He’d send me notes in “WoW’s” mail system saying he was thinking of me. Once, I expressed my desire for a rare dragon pet, and the next day, it appeared in my mailbox. He must have spent hours slaying dragons and waiting for one to relinquish my gift.

We’d position our avatars next to one another so that we appeared to hold hands. We’d lie down together and look at the “stars.” Salty’s avatar was sexy: broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted with long hair, big arms and pale blue skin. In real life, he was more cute than sexy: a kind face with nice features, a compact build, black hair. In the picture he emailed, he was surrounded by male friends; Salty was the shortest of the bunch but the handsomest. I never sent him a picture of myself.

I wasn’t great at “WoW,” and I needed his help. He was at a higher level but always happy to redo missions he’d already completed just to aid me in accomplishing my goals.

I appreciated his assistance, but that’s not why I kept him around. I enjoyed his company. He was caring and kind and always happy to “see” me. It made my lonely life brighter to know that someone somewhere desired my company, even if he knew only a prettier, magical version of me.

Our romance was a time bomb. One day, as we rode dragons across the plains, Salty expressed his feelings for me: “We’re not allowed to have sex before marriage, but I have a feeling that if you were here in Idaho, I’d be bad.”

If you read the whole thing, you may question the choices that created this situation, or the way it was resolved. Me, I find the story interesting as a document on how and why online attraction works. And the little vignette about the dragon-pet seduction? That’s cute, you gotta admit it.

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Finding Love On Prodigy

Not quite 10 years ago, I started exchanging emails with The Nymph after we met on a forum. When she finally decided to travel (a considerable distance!) so we could visit (me having a more inflexible job than her at the time) her sisters pitched a considerable fit because they thought that as “some man on the internet” I was probably going to dismember her and stow the parts in plastic trash bags; they’d seen it happen on some breathless television show, you understand.

Well, that’s not quite how it went, and we’re still happy together. So you’ll understand why I have considerable sympathy in me for this tale of a 19-year relationship that began on Prodigy and really got going with a first date that ended with a ride home to the folks in a police car:

My parents weren’t concerned that they never paid for my Prodigy usage nor did they understand why there never seemed to be any long-distance charges for calling the boy I’d met from New York City on the teen discussion message board.

Our parents didn’t mind us chatting online or talking on the phone, which we did for hours at a time thanks to a phone-phreaking acquaintance, and they didn’t object to us meeting in person. They just didn’t want to put much effort into making it happen.

I realized if I was ever going to hang out with the boy of my angsty, riot grrrl dreams, I’d have to do it on my own.

After yet another explosive fight with my parents, I told them I was going to the deli down the street to grab a sub, but instead, I called a taxi from a payphone. Before I left, I told my uncle where I was going and swore him to secrecy.

The taxi took me to the Trenton train station, which began my long trek to the wilderness of Staten Island–a place so backwards that it wasn’t totally wired for cable TV until the early 1990s. Even today, wild turkeys roam the streets.

From Trenton to Hoboken to the World Trade Center to the Whitehall ferry terminal to the Staten Island ferry terminal, where the boy was waiting for me in the arrivals hall decked out in his finest clothes of a Skinny Puppy T-shirt and Docs…

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