I was sent a link by the folks at Newsweek of all places pointing me in the direction of an article with the provocative title “A Geek Love Story” and I sort of predicted ahead of time how this would go: social misfits with marital problems raise expectations to unrealistic level because of their compulsions and addictions in a virtual world, meet, tragedy ensues, coverage on Sky News at 11:00.
But, well, the e-mail said that at least one person at Newsweek loved my blog – which I felt either means that reporters have too much time on their hands or it’s a “hey, love ya, kiss kiss” kind of thing followed by linky back-scratching. But putting that aside, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and actually click the link.
So I was shocked to discover – well, to discover that they hit a pitch perfect story of what it means to fall in love in a virtual world, and the challenges of translating that to actual life….and to provide one story where the fairy tale actually seems to have a happy ending.
They know their relationship sounds odd—and, they admit, it’s far from ideal. But beneath all the high-tech gadgetry, behind the Webcams and avatars, is an ordinary—if admittedly geeky—romance between two ordinary people. The only thing extraordinary about Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins’s life together is that, at any other moment in history, it would’ve been impossible. But the couple have found a way to write their own unlikely love story, one that upends all kinds of assumptions about desire and intimacy in the digital age, starting with the big one: that love begins at first sight.
The Many Ways We Touch
The Newsweek article is a fairly stunning, even-handed and deeply emotional story. It shines a light on the challenges we have in understanding virtual worlds and the impact they can have on our perceptions of self, of love, of feeling, and of connection. Unlike other stories of the oddities and characters hidden behind the beautiful avatar, this article doesn’t set out to shock, or to turn into an episode of Jerry Springer.
Jessica Bennett, the author, writes:
Technologies like Second Life are allowing us to rethink what being “together” really means. They’re inverting our laws of attraction, thrusting us into a zone where desire can be more abstract than pure physical lust, and where intimacy begins not with a partner’s touch, but with the things that usually come much later—the emotional candor that can take years to achieve.
Which makes sense: getting to know someone gradually, with patience and attention, seems a whole lot healthier than a drunken proposition in a bar. There are still plenty of folks who think of the Internet as chilly and perverse, but a competing sense of that universe as warm and humane, an instrument of fulfillment, is finding flower as successive generations grow up wired. Gartner Research has estimated that by 2011, four out of five people online—1.6 billion of 2 billion Internet users—will have experimented with a virtual medium like Second Life. According to a 2006 Pew survey, one in 10 Internet users already search for love online, and 15 percent of American adults say they know someone who married or seriously dated an online match. There are 800 active dating sites in the U.S., chasing industry revenue that, according to Jupiter Research, is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2012. “The Internet has an amazing capacity to allow people to self-sort—to find and engage with like-minded others,” says Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, who has written on politics in the information age. “That will have impacts for courtship and dating that go beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”
The Screen and the Great Divide
Tom Boellstorff, in his study of Second Life, struggled with the issue of finding a terminology and frame of reference for our virtual selves. While he was struck by the use of the term “real life” by Residents of Second Life as a short form for all the stuff that happens ‘out of world’, his preference was to counter-point virtual with ‘actual’ and I’ve variously heard terms like ‘meat space’, ‘atomic’ and ‘physical’.
His intent was to make sure that in studying ‘virtual worlds’ we avoid calling those experiences “unreal” – to avoid the opposite of real being virtual, which would denigrate the reality of the virtual experience.
But at the end of the day, he was also struck by that distance – that regardless of how much we might have real experiences in virtual world, there is always a remove from being actual. This doesn’t negate the experience, but it does say that we will always be “virtually there” – as if we’re headed to a destination and never quite arrive.
The Newsweek article talks about this:
Hardest of all is the impossibility of physical closeness. The Web is a hothouse for eroticism, but ultimately, touch is elemental. For a while, Lillie and Hawkins messed around with the seriocomic options available in Second Life, where in order to have sex, you actually have to go to a store and buy the parts. It’s cheap, and the options are, well, limitless. But what no one has solved is a way for Lillie to feel Hawkins’s body next to hers—and those senses shouldn’t be understated. “The brain is built for person-to-person communication,” says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies the chemistry of love. “Just kissing somebody can give an enormous amount of information about them: the amount of pressure can show sensitivity, kindness or patience, the way they hold your head can show compassion.”
The article has its denouement in the distant lovers meeting – something like a Sleepless in Seattle moment, their eyes lock across the crowded room kind of thing (cue tears and swelling music):
She arrived at the airport, and spotted Hawkins immediately, grinning from across the terminal. They embraced, and their fears about that moment, whether it would be different, quickly faded. “As soon as we saw each other, we realized things were exactly the same,” says Hawkins. They spent the next three weeks together, grocery shopping, cooking, hanging with family and friends—the ordinary things they couldn’t ordinarily do. On their first night together, Hawkins proposed—with a ring engraved with CARIAD, the Welsh word for “sweetheart.”
But in some ways, this skirts the deeper question: the one where the article DOESN’T end in the couple meeting at all. Where their ‘actual’ identities aren’t revealed, and yet their love still seems real. While there may be no substitute for the physical, the article points to the idea that “brain chemistry doesn’t distinguish between the real and the virtual”….and as virtual experiences become increasingly rich…in fact, as many online experiences become rich with context and intimacy, our definitions of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ become blurred, and one day it might not seem so odd for the story to end not with the couple meeting, but never physically meeting at all.
I could see people developing romantic relationships virtually where they never met in the material world. They could even marry legally by proxy and conceive children through postal artificial insemination, but what then of the children of such unions? Just a strange flight of fancy at this point, but hey.. It could happen!
While we cannot touch each other in virtual environments, as poignantly expressed in artist Alpha Auer’s “Body Parts” installation: http://npirl.blogspot.com/2009/03/body-parts-virtual-lovers-are-star.html, we can, and do, meet. We meet people from all over the world and share the same virtual space with them, and that is a gift beyond measure. Kudos to Newsweek for an intelligent and balanced piece.
Mirror or Doorway?
All virtuality groping into our reality requires this examination.
When the audience is many, the reflection becomes a culture. When the audience is one, the reflection becomes just another reflection.
The contradiction of the meta becomes even more obvious as we all “accelerate” our passings BUT try to convince ourselves we have “deepened” our connections.
Media Induced Pyschosis- MIPS. Its been the growing human condition for a century, and I dont see any singularity/transformative cure yet:)
Interesting that TRIBE, and GROUPME type websites keep failing the mass media meme test while MYspace, and FACEbook and Twitter, the more narcissitic the more valued?, type offerings keep growing and reflecting in our society.
Will Wright talks about Narcissism and the audience see’s it as a positive development in affect. very odd.
The metaverse will become more and more important with new interfaces. SL is a leap forward – one that was envisaged by SF writers such as Arthur C Clarke when describing how people can meet without travel. SL relationships and friendships are every bit – and more – personal and real experiences as letter correspondence. We hold up love letters as a great literary and “real” experience. Two people – or more where friendships are concerned – meeting and working/playing/loving together in a “metaverse” is most definately as real as any other relationship (the only sense not stimulated is smell…:)
SL is also a place where politics can be fought/debated and agreement found through an interface where the consequences of war etc can be seen as, well, lack of communication, hence, useless. No-one wins. People who use SL regularly usually get over disagreements and come to some sort of agreement and find they can work together.
Those on the left can argue/ fight/ disagree and find what unites them by joining sl left unity.
I was really happy that Newsweek wrote a story on our story. I have met many couples who have met online and have lived to have successful and happy marriages. People are always skeptical about online love, but until you experience it… it can’t be understood. Because it’s too hard to fathom it. I’m very thankful for what I do have… no matter “how” I found it.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Impossibly Positive: Love in a Virtual … [...]
Great articles from both Newsweek and Dusan! This deals with observations that also fit very well in the discour I was thinking of when I created the online debate group “Second Life – Is REAL!” over 18 months ago.
Please also join us there for discussing about the reality of new non-physical and live interactive narrative online communications. And what it’s relevance could be in the history of mankind… http://flickr.com/groups/slreal
[...] Love via Newsweek [...]
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when your rl partner is on sl, meeting new people – it’s scary, and it is so easy to feel second fiddle. It is a huge test on your relationship and can increase the distance between you, especially as they spend more time talking to others intimately, and less time talking with you, realizing, perhaps that their rl relationship isn’t what they truly want. Is that a good thing?
Oh, and to clear up a lot of confusion… we have met in person several times. When I first met him in person it was in London when I flew over there. ITV filmed a documentary about us, so all of our first moments are actually captured on film. It was a made for broadband series, and if you google Rhonda Lillie & Paul Hawkins and Second Lifers all in one go you can see that we have indeed met. He’s flown here to California and met my family, and I’ve been to the UK twice to meet and hang out with his. Each trip we spent over 3 weeks each time. So,… yes, we met online in Second Life,… yes we keep in touch via webcams on SKYPE and yes, we have met each other 3 times in the past few years. It’s just that for the first 2 1/2 years we were “only online” but for the past 2 1/2 years we’ve been traveling to see each other as often as we can afford to. The only reason we’re not together yet (married) is because of laws/rules/immigration… and we are working on all of that, fixing everything so we can finally be together. But, it’s working out fine and we’re happy.
Jo,
In my opinion (since I went through that) there’s something missing in real life that draws us to Second Life… whether it’s a partner who we can converse with openly, to needing more attention, to whatever may be missing. People seek out what they are missing in many ways, it’s just that instead of going out to bars with friends, or such they decided it’s easier to stay home and go to a virtual bar. I don’t blame Second Life for creating an environment like this, because it’s not the environment that causes failed relationships, the relationships are failing because there’s something missing and the people in these relationships will do what they must do to find happiness… and in the end, is there anything wrong with moving on when you’re no longer happy?
Jo:
If you knew Rhonda before meeting the love of her life however they had met, you would understand time, space, and oceans would not keep their souls apart. Rhonda is as real in SL as she is in RL. I speak from experience. I have known her for over 14 yrs. So, believe me, she has changed for no one. And although I have not met Joe in person, I know from her and what I do know of him … their souls have been waiting a long time to come together