My Internet Boyfriend in Michigan

There was a time when if you mentioned you’d met someone on the internet, it was laughable (remember Napoleon Dynamite’s brother meeting his wife online?) and often questionable (it’s easy to have a perfect boyfriend if no one’s actually met him). But these days, almost all forms of internet socializing are acceptable.

I came to this realization when a friend of mine told me that she lived in the same neighbourhood as a guy we used to go to high school with and she saw him quite often. In real life, she had never stopped to say hello, but within the medium of Facebook, she added him as a friend and made contact.

Over the past few weeks that I have been signed up with Facebook, I have “added friends”* who were people I went to grade school with, people I’ve worked with, boys I’ve gone on a few dates with, friends of friends and one guy who I think I’ve said 3 words to in my life. All contact has been over the website, although I’ve had two suggestions of getting the “web communities” together at an event.

Which slightly scares me. And I don’t really know why. Maybe because you hear of all the cyber-stalking that goes on (a benign form of which I myself have indulged in on occasion – my brother likes to refer to looking at people’s Facebook profiles without their knowledge as “passive stalking”) or maybe I still harbour some Napoleon Dynamite bias, if that is the right word.

I have been reading and commenting on the insightful and perspicacious blog That Shakespeherian Rag over the past couple of months, a blog which I found through a series of serendipitous six-degrees-of-separation-esque events (okay, I dated his friend), and recently found myself in the same room with the author. Due to my aversion to meeting blog buddies in real life, I chickened out at the offer to meet face-to-face (see my comment on the Quiz Night post). I felt like my web community should be separate from my real-life community.

Which brings me to internet dating. I haven’t tried it, and I’m still not at a point in my life where I’m willing to try it. But really, being on Lavalife if you’re single is a totally normal thing. Many relationships have started on dating websites and I personally know of two marriages that have happened as a result of hooking up online.

Our lives are lived online more and more. Instead of going to the bank to pay bills, you do it on EasyWeb. Why bother buying an actual newspaper when you can read most of the articles on the online version. Memos have long been a thing of the past because information is now disseminated via e-mail. I don’t even check the weather on TV anymore: the Weather Network is bookmarked as one of my daily sites. And now, instead of wasting time and money at the bar, you can sort through hundreds of potential suitors and not end up kissing the wrong one at 3am just as the ugly lights are coming on.

But ay, here’s the rub: my real-life friends have become my online friends. So why can’t my online friends become my real-life friends?

Ignoring the choplogic, I think the answer lies in our innate sociability as humans. Sure, the internet acts as a conduit for social introductions, but it doesn’t replace the day-to-day interactions with people you know. And just as you may smile and wave at your letter carrier and leave it at that, you may poke or write a wall message to one of your Facebook friends and never really go beyond that.

And although using Lavalife as a forum to meet your partner is completely reasonable nowadays, conducting an entire courtship over the internet, without ever meeting, is still considered just plain weird.

Now I wonder if my friend will stop next time she runs into her Facebook friend in her neighbourhood and make their virtual socialization into a tangible interaction…


* For those of you not on Facebook, a) what’s the delay? and b) adding a friend is when you find someone, or someone finds you, and you add them to your visual list of friends on your profile page, for everyone to see how popular you are.