Finding someone as a potential mate has been difficult for me these days. Shortly before I got into the habit of meeting women in the flesh again, as early as this past June, I lived out a life of fantasy for at least three years, by establishing online love relationships as a means to an end.
Ah, the art of an online love relationship. How easy can it be to declare your love for someone you’ve never seen before? A little too easy, if you ask me and also; how hard is it to hold an online relationship, anyway? In reality, it’s quite difficult, because you still had to “speak” to your “loves” in strange mannerisms, whether it was online or on the telephone.
That’s where the plus-one factor comes into play with all of this experience however, was that it built up my creative skills, both in writing online and self-expression through emails and the telephone. The telephone as I well know can be an instrument of destruction, suicide & desecration, as well as a pleasurable tool in more ways than one.
One of the greater disadvantages of establishing an online relationship was learning the reality of the situation at hand, which was discovering that it was extremely difficult to carry a torch for someone you couldn’t possibly see, feel, smell or even touch. But I chose this life, if for whatever miniscule reasoning behind it, to build up my emotional skills.
And what a bevy of women I got involved with, everywhere from America, to Mexico to Peru to Denmark to England and all points far & in between. Most wanted the same thing; love and understanding. But most of them were a little daft. Off-beat and usually something was wrong with them, as in their emotional past, like incest, rape, paranoia of government, terrible ex-husbands and all the sort of usual baggage items plopped down in the return aisle of the grocery store.
But there were a few out there who were outstanding. Take Jamie for instance; she was nice and sweet and lived a simple life in Mexico City. She seemed perfect in all ways. We exchanged photos early on & had met through a mutual friend of ours, someone we had both met online, whom for longest time had been trying to get us together.
And we did write long exhausting letters to each other. It was nice. But our mutual online friend Lori was less than hospitable toward me; she insisted to know everything that was going on between us; after all, she put us together, so she felt she had privy to particular bits of private information that we didn’t particularly want to share with her, let alone anyone else.
Then it came time to meet Jamie. We planned on meeting in the Southwestern part of America; close to where she lived & close to where my parents live. Arrangements were going along smoothly until I asked to see current photos of her & when she sent them & I viewed them they were not the photos I recalled seeing months earlier, almost as if the first photos were of somebody else.
They might have been, but these new photos showed someone else that didn’t exactly excite me. And I wondered about it. So then I called and I spoke to a good friend of mine, Blanche J. of Texas about the photos and he told me something to the effect of, “You have to think about it like this; is that the face you really want to wake up with and see at the breakfast table every morning?” So I thought about it deep and long.
Eventually I emailed her back and told her that I didn’t want to meet her after all. She was upset, but she understood, so she said. It was her friend Lori however, that browbeat me for the next two weeks about the entire situation. It was nerve-wracking and I didn’t feel right about this person even if we did seem to hit it off online.
Then there was Christina; we hit it off extremely well, she had a young son, whom I spoke to frequently and seemed to get along with. Christina was struggling, lived in Lima, Peru and had dreams of her own. At that point of my life I was struggling too, with no job and the possibility of becoming homeless was right outside my doorstep.
One of those dreams included me in it somewhere & try as I might to help her get into the United States with all of the suggestions I made such as being sponsored by an employer, a family member, college/university studies, she turned all of them down flat.
Her idea was to get me to fly down to Peru; she would pay for the plane ticket on one condition; if I signed a marriage contract & make her my bride. That’s when the communication slowed down & I made myself a promise not to do that. It might have been a green card trap, an easy way for her to slip into America and then say to me, “See ya later, ‘gator” and she might have divorced me right away. I made a promise not only to my Mom, but to myself, that this particular idea wasn’t very practical.
Last I heard, she did get her ex-mother-in-law to sponsor her & her son to come to Denmark, where she took a few educational chef school courses; then she landed a good job in the restaurant industry & latched herself onto a rich Italian man who takes her everywhere and gives her everything she wants. She knew all along what she was doing. And she did it so well, too. But still she can’t spell.
And that’s the trouble with online relationships; you never know what you’re going to get when you flip on the screen and type to the person on the opposite side, whether or not they are truly real, the photograph is current, their friend is doing the coaching, whether or not the person on the other side is actually the person you are supposed to be talking to or not, plus a whole slew of other sorry excuses online relationships tend to fall into.
Relationships should be humanly real and content; there should be ample time for fighting and hurtful feelings at times; there should also be plenty of time for compromising, kissing and making up too. There should be times spent together like going to movies, the opera, musicals, and dinners at fancy restaurants, quiet walks in the rain and other gentle and adventurous prospects. Most of all the intimacy whenever or however it shows up should be forthcoming, natural and easy.
After all, it is hard to kiss a screen.
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