So what, if anything, do I see as wrong with that Internet intimacy, and other Internet friendships I made the same year? Go back and read the first postagain. Then look at my senior pics below...and read further.

I was a SENIOR, CO-CAPTAIN OF MY SOCCER TEAM,I’m 6’2” with eyes of blue (ok, 5’11.5” with brown eyes, sheesh, allow me some exaggeration for story’s sake) and I’m spending my time on a 15-year-old girl I never loved. (I liked her, but she was 2000 miles away, and 2.5 years younger, and I never got serious about her or vice versa). What in the world? What about school friends? Did you know that I barely applied for college that year because I was so busy with extracurricular activities? To the point that my dad filled out half the application and shoved it to me to finish the rest?! That despite being 99th percentile type on standardized tests?

Oh, and more importantly (kidding!), why was she the major feminine influence in my life? Come on, there’s not much more social capital in life than being a senior, starter on the sports teams, smart, and having deceivingly good-looking senior pictures! Why didn’t I choose to develop a relationship with, say, the junior captain of the girls’ basketball team, the only other student in morning math class? (Told you it was a small school!). Or the girl goth artist who became a good friend as the senior year went on? Or the younger girl with the pretty blue eyes who had a crush on me? (Ok, she was in middle school, come to think of it, so there was a good reason to ignore her!) Why not any of the girls on my own JOS team, who I was spending hours with weekly? Oh, I can give you reasons, babble about so-and-so having a boyfriend and my 17-year-old self being smart enough to realize that having a girlfriend just to lose her was no way to go through life, blah-blah-blah…but Web intimacy does this to people, every time. Is the Web REALLY filled with more interesting people? Or are we too busy, too afraid of real-life intimacy to find out, and we turn to the web?

And who did I impress? A talented but lonely 15-year-old girl, with one younger sibling, impressed by a senior. Wow, pulling that off was like splitting the atom! Don’t take this personally you all, but winning Internet respect is not that hard. What about that intimacy, that knowing and being known-ness that I was building with Miss Hollywood? Sure, it was deep when it came to JOS; but when I started asking her about other things, or we actually talked about our attitudes toward dating, I realized we were quite different! Internet intimacy is deep, but it is not broad. You tell me about your broken past, I tell you about my dreams and fears…and then we wake up in the middle of the night and realize that the pretty pictures we painted for each other are but mist and spiderwebs. The truth does not lie in histories and fantasies,but in who we are now. And what happens when you sign on, and their names disappear from the screen? Is it computer failure, or is it lack of interest? You never know, do you?

Oh, but I was able to reveal myself honestly in conversation! What about my freedom to be me? Well…she kind of accidentally let slip some things I had told her about someone else to that person. Oops! So much for that freedom. And did I forgive, shrug off those details she shared with someone else? No, I felt betrayed, wanted an apology, and snapped those bonds of friendship in two in an angry Christmas day conversation two years later that doesn’t rank high on my proudest moments list. (Seriously, Christmas day? Classy of you, 19-year old GreekPhysique!) But it had to happen, sadly…pieces of me no longer belonged with her, and our friendship couldn't grow any more because of the distance. That's another creepy part of Web relationships--why do they feel so much deeper than real-life relationships?

Anyway, bottom line is, we had 6-7 great months of talking to each other, then I went off to college (so we no longer had JOS in common), and we slowly started drifting apart. We went from chatting almost nightly to once a week to rarely. Also, some mutual acquaintances of ours, by their actions, started forcing us to choose sides between them, and unfortunately we ended up on opposite sides. It's impressive that we talked with each other as long as we did. The eventual break didn't come until 2 years later. Eventually, our personal shortcomings became more noticeable to each other, and that was that. Have I talked to her since? I actually befriended her recently on a social networking site and exchanged brief update messages.

Looking back, I don't really regret the relationship itself; she was smart, cute, and socially very engaging, and I think I gained a lot from my interactions with her. I couldn't type so many posts if she hadn't taught me through AIM! This isn't one of these stories where I tell you she grew up to be a terrible person. She's a successful professional today. But I still have to wonder--why so much time, just for her? What did I miss my senior year and first year of college while talking to her on AIM? I'll never know.

Aha, so I see my post on E-lationships was greeted with remarkable enthusiasm for it being a weekend post. You like reading the tragedies of my youth, eh? You monsters! Just teasing; I wouldn't share it if I didn't feel comfortable doing so.

So here’s what I got from my first e-lationship, in summary:
Instant feedback and friendship
A playmate: she was funny and friendly, and we were too young to bother with dumb “Can a man and a woman be platonic friends?” questions that plague 20-somethings.
A feeling that I was special, because I knew smart people in different places of the US. I no longer was trapped by geography.
A freedom to be myself that I didn’t feel in real-life conversation at the time. In real-life, I read faces and feelings too much (I’m not saying correctly! I just said read) and sometimes can’t get my point across as well as I’d like. On the web, I feel no such hindrance; the words flow freely from my brain to my fingers.
A feeling of rapid intimacy; that we two really did understood each other, that we had all these things in common.                                                                    A friend to close the evening with. This is always one thing that has annoyed me, especially now that I live alone; in the evening, one must close out the day alone, separated from friends. That is no longer a problem with Interent communication.

So what's so great about knowing and being known on the web? Let me know. I'll post the ending of my first e-lationship and how I feel about it now later this week.

Ouch, that might be one of my worst puns yet. Anyway, I decided the best way to discuss Internet Intimacy would be for me to actually tell a real-life story for once. This happened a decade ago, so I feel ok with statutes of limitations and such, heh. Let me tell you about my first Internet relationship,
period. My dad signed up for Internet services for years, but it wasn’t until
1997, my senior year of high school, that I was interested in surfing the WWW. I tried the Internet because I was in an
academic competition that was JeopardyonSteroids* (JOS). It consisted of teams
all over the US.
They had an on-line forum board, so I wanted to talk about JOS with other
people. 

When I got on-line, I had two plans: (1) Don’t visit any
site except the JOS site and (2) Don’t talk to people I could never meet in
person. Perhaps my 17 year-old self was wiser than my 27 year-old self when it
came to the Internet? heh. Anyway, one day in January a little box popped up on
AOL: “Bing!”. And there were words
appearing in it! What was it? What was this “IM” thingy?!

It was a 15-year-old girl who was also in JOS. I had sent
her an annoying e-mail about something she wrote on the JOS web-site, where I
basically had told her I was cooler than her. But one of the wonders of
Internet communication is that any attention offered is usually enough to get a
conversation going. So she IM’ed me, and her quick typing compared to my slow
hunt-and-peck method made me feel dumb in comparison. The first real benefit I
got from the Internet is I learned to type from AIM—take
that, Mavis Beacon! If you were a 15-year-old girl, Mavis, I would have learned
typing before I turned 17.

Anyway, at the time I was a senior, co-captain of the soccer
team (that's me on the right after yet another loss, ha, along with my best friend from high school), high academic honor type, in a small school where my graduating class was
15 people. I‘m an oldest child, too. I was very defined by my roles in life,
and had a fixed, limited vision of who I was. Suddenly, this Web relationship
changed all that. I felt free to joke as I pleased and not worry that word
would get around my small school or that I’d let down my family. I realized
that I could be funny! or at least funny enough to make a 15-year-old girl type
LOL. (Yes, you can make a snarky comment about how it doesn’t take much, heh).
This was a revelation for me; I had had several platonic female friends in
middle school and high school, but there had not been much humor in those
relationships. Mutual respect and great conversation, yes, but not humor. Even
now, I often forget that women really do love humor. I think it’s because they
are so poor at creating humor, I forget that they enjoy laughter. (My turn for
a snarky comment!)

 Also, I forgot to tell you, at the time I’m in a mostly
white community…and here she is, living in Hollywood*, dark-skinned (Southeast Asian, to
be precise), and yet we still get along. Don’t think I wasn’t intrigued at the
time by knowing a real Hollywood girl. We bond
around JOS and talk often in-between dial-up Internet crashes. And here we are,
so different, yet it seems like we have so much in common. She enjoys JOS, so
do I. She’s smart, so am I. So we talk about that all the time, start to know
and be known. She sends me pictures of her. I met her at a JOS tournament
briefly, so I know she’s not a 50-year-old man, ha. I make other on-line
friends from JOS, but she is my favorite. So I’m trapped in a wonderful cycle
during the second half of my senior year; I come home from basketball practice,
attack my homework, study for JOS, and then get on late at night just as she
signs on from the West Coast. I talk until I'm tired and then go to sleep.

That year, my team for JOS was weak (pictured above). But I knew there was
only one way to see Miss Hollywood and my JOS friends again; win a spot in the
National tournament. We hadn’t done it for the last two years, and that with
stronger teams. But I was inspired now, for that and other reasons, and I worked
HARD and got us the invite. So this Internet friendship made me fight harder in
real life; not only was I learning more about myself, but I was becoming more
successful as well.

Have you caught the red flags yet as to where perhaps this
wonderful Internet Intimacy with Miss Hollywood failed me? We’ll get to it next
time, but for now, just focus on the positive. What's so good about being known and knowing someone else on the Internet? List away in the comments!

*details have been toyed with to make the boring amusing

I have not read the book above in full detail, but its title has intrigued me. On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous; who in the world hides from love? It's like saying "I'm scared of chocolate cake" or "I refuse large wads of cash"--it's crazy! But...maybe not so crazy.

During winter break, I wanted to talk about intimacy. I'm not interested in talking about romantic intimacy. In fact, I intentionally want to steer away from that type of intimacy, because I think our culture has deceived itself into thinking that intimacy can only be found in romantic relationships. No, I instead am defining intimacy more generally, as that feeling of knowing (or discovering) and being known (or encouraging/allowing discovery). (Perhaps there is a better word rather than intimacy--I rejected telepathy, connection, and transparency and settled on intimacy as the word that was closest). To start off these posts, I wanted to talk about two fiercely intimate experiences I had, in which I felt that I was revealed and also something was revealed to me. I share these experiences to hopefully broaden your understanding of intimacy and make the definition more general.

It was a hot day in 2007, and I was playing 2-2 basketball with some high school kids. My teammate was fast and clever at getting open, while I was talented at getting the ball to him as soon as he got open. We suddenly started connecting as if we had played with each other for years--behind-the-back passes, alley-oops, throwing passes into space and letting him catch up to them, you name it. And he just started laughing, both to tease the other team but also, I think, because his ability to play so well and my ability to match skills with him gave him pleasure. I started smiling in response, a really big grin, and we worked our offense again and scored. I remember that moment, where he realized that I would reward him with the ball if he kept running, and I realized that he would work hard to get open and score if I got him the ball...it was intimacy, as funny as that sounds. Oh, most men would HATE admitting the intimate part of sports, but it's there. Watch when a basketball player receives a nice pass from another player to score a basket, and then points at that player and nods his head as he comes upcourt. They have joy then. There's a joy to sports, to the workplace, where people realize that they understand one another's skills, and that someone else understands how best to use them and to put them in positions where they will succeed. Don't underestimate this joy!

It was a chilly spring day in 2004, and I was working to complete a take-home final project for an advanced statistics course. I spent four days straight, 10 hours a day on average, working on that take-home final on the computer. But I remember, that around day 3 or 4, I realized that I was learning many new statistics skills, that I was actually becoming very good at this, and that I would be successful on the project. The rest of the project was sheer joy, because I now understood the project and had made it known. No, there was no two-way flow; the project could not find out about me, and I could not make myself known to it. But the joy of learning, of knowing, was great. For those of us who are more task-oriented in life, we sometimes receive intimacy from our tasks. Yes, there's a danger of workaholicism; but there's also more pleasure there than some of you may think. The hard part may be that when you receive intimacy in that way, you forget that you must also make yourself known to receive the full joy of intimacy; and that only happens with another person. But don't underestimate that joy, either! It is another type of intimacy.

I'll talk about more traditional views on intimacy soon enough. I just wanted to open up your understanding of intimacy.