Facebook love story (part 1)

For days, then weeks, we've exchanged messages and images and we've shared our most intimate thoughts. Her name was May. 

I felt, we both felt something was growing there, I couldn't tell exactly what, but there was definitely something.  We were getting close, so close. Despite all this, I didn't realize I didn't know whether that was her real name or where she really lived. I could go on just knowing that we had something going on. Practically, I was establishing a relationship with a name attached to an image. This was actually the core of any attempted relationship: we always idealize the one towards whom we develop feelings. We tend to look over any flaws and faults, just to bring that person closer to our ideal, the ideal us projected outside of us, that which we long to identify ourselves with. It must be somehow a part of the Janus complex still residing in so many of us.

I started to fantasize about our first meeting, then about our second and the third. I imagined entire conversations, I made plans. I used to jerk off imagining that we had sex. This went on hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, so after ten month or so I suddenly came to realize that I started to come back to a machine – a machine that delivered a message – after all, when the machine was broken, so was my heart. Weird. 

I so much depended on a messaging software (my computer or my smartphone) to create some sort of illusory happiness, that I often confused the message with the messenger. After all, on the other side of my broadband line could have been a bot, for all I cared. It was all in the illusion I so happily lived, I completely consumed it and it has consumed myself for all this time.

After a few months of virtual relationship, my brain was so cooked, that I imagined I had a real relationship, although all I did was I chatted online and left online messages, exchanged pictures and short home movies. I manifested all the symptoms of a guy who was really in love. The only thing was, I couldn't answer a simple question, should anyone had asked: can we meet your girlfriend? Well yes, I could share some images, but there was nothing to prove our relationship other than infinite logs and instant messaging archives. I started to grow impatient.

Facebook love story (part 2)