How doth this week’s subject relate to my real life? Let me count the ways…
My husband and I did not meet online. We met at a mutual friend’s Pennsylvania wedding in the summer of 2014. Our exchanges were brief, we had once dance together, and that was it. After the wedding week, he went back to his life and I drove home to Illinois to resume mine. It was radio silence. An entire year of radio silence.
Fast forward roughly thirteen months of that, and a Facebook comment on one of my photos appeared in my notifications. It was from a vaguely familiar-looking curly haired boy. A few days later, a friend request followed. Within a week, we were staying up until dawn instant messaging each other. I reveled in every message, every paragraph, and eventually every essay sent back and forth about topics ranging from philosophy and religion to science and music. I was smitten. I thought it was magic.
He, on the other hand, thought it was simply a fun use of his overabundance of time and wifi access.
It was less than a week before I found out about his seven-year crush on a girl he grew up with. He took care of her rabbit and built it a hutch. He planned on marrying her. She never felt the same way, but he didn’t seem to mind. For seven years, he carried that torch despite her relentless downpour on his parade.
In time, I let my feelings fade and we became friends. We’d text back and forth every few months, keeping in touch about the biggest details of our lives and where we’d moved to. He’d send me a picture of a mountain he hiked, and I’d tell him about a new band I discovered. We were long-distance friends who had only really met in real life twice. Until we weren’t. In the winter of 2017, we reconnected more deeply. The all-nighter talks happened again, only this time we were receiving and sending the exact same message. Our lives were panning out similarly. We began to feel the same. We saw each other for the third time February 7th. Our wedding was on the 28th. Happily ever beginning.
We got married on a Wednesday afternoon at the Craftsbury Public Library in VT
This story, while being completely true and more than a little ridiculous, reflects a handful of points brought up this week about online dating. The obvious one that stood out to me - rather glaringly that one week in 2015 - was the room for miscommunication and missed cued among online communication. In that first week of intense, vulnerable conversation, I was receiving a lot of signals that he wasn’t actually sending. This had everything to do with our differing media ideologies: I placed high value and intimacy on late-night, hours-long conversations over instant messaging, while he saw it as an everyday activity among friends. We were reading different messages from the same texts.
Another point brought up in Baym’s chapter was the fact that social networking sites often potentiates opposite-gender friendships that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Before Matt and I decided (perhaps a bit spontaneously) to get married, we were friends for over two years. Without SNS’s, we would not have gotten to know each other as we had. Our lives would not have been shared, our common interests left uncovered, and our eventual partnership impossible. For most of that time, he was one of the only male friends I consistently had. Offline, opposite sex friendships were complicated and difficult. Online, it was different.
The last thing worth pointing out about this story is the intimacy that SNS’s allow for. While getting to know each other over instant messaging and then eventually texting, we began to share more and more vulnerable information. By the time we reconnected the second time, it took less than a week for us to disclose our romantic feelings and intentions.
The reliance on text, despite all its missing cues, allowed each of us a safe enough distance to become as close as possible.
If you think I’m absolutely crazy for doing what we did and marrying so quickly, don’t think I’m alone. Plenty of people have more insane stories than mine. Studies are showing that cultivating relationships online and through SNS's really do have a chance at success.
Have you ever experienced these aspects of online relationships or dating? How do your same-sex and opposite-sex friendships stack up offline vs online? Have you ever caught yourself being more intimate with an online friend than you expected?
First of all, congratulations. I’m glad there weren’t any unrequited feelings between you and your husband, in the end. I think people meeting on Facebook or Tinder (in the case of two of our classmates) or any digital medium is just as sweet as meeting in real life. The chances of falling in love digitally or in-person are equally rare and definitely worth celebrating.
ReplyDeleteI actually wanted to comment on your mention of ‘opposite gender friendships’. I think you’re right—they are difficult to maintain when you’re constantly face-to-face with the person. Feelings are bound to pop up on one or both sides. Friendship becomes something more. Then, you break up—or you get married. How many people are still close friends with their exes? And how many married couples want their partners hanging out with close friends of the opposite sex? That ‘middle ground’ of platonic friendship is difficult to maintain.
However, if you were friends with someone on the opposite side of the country—the world—or even just a few towns over, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. And you get to have a friend with distinct view points and behavior specific to their gender. Really, friendships with the opposite sex have lead to some of the best conversations and opinion-reversals I’ve had.
I think this is definitely a boon of the age we live in.