The Power of Love on the Internet

I met two of my four exes online. I know; I’m totally a child of the Internet age. I have no idea what it’s like to only meet guys at school or church or (ugh) in bars. Of course, the Internet is kind of one giant bar, and you never know exactly what you’re walking into.

I wasn’t actively looking for a boyfriend when I met Shane online. I met him in a role-playing chat room. For those unfamiliar with role-playing chat rooms, they’re just like regular chat rooms except everyone is playing a character… so, kind of, they’re still just like regular chat rooms, except you make no pretense about pretending to be someone you’re not.

This particular role-playing chat room was a Star Wars themed one, I think. It pains me to say that, because I want to convince you (and myself) that I was eventually able to shed the weirdness of middle school and blend with normal society. But I didn’t really tell anyone about the Star Wars role-playing chat room, so I was half-way there anyway.

My character was a gorgeous, red-haired, kick-ass smuggler with a great ass and a bad attitude—basically, everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. His character was a suave, good-looking adventurer—and I will admit that he actually did turn out to be suave and good-looking, especially for a 15-year-old.

Admittedly, it didn’t take much to impress me with boys at fifteen. Joe had been fond of writing crappy love poems in rhyming (kind of) iambic pentameter, so I was actually pretty impressed with any human male who could string words together without trying to rhyme “love” and “gave,” and “mine” and “kind.” Shane was considerably more talented than that.

Our characters actually fell in love before we did. Yep, my character and his character were kind of an Internet item, at least in our little Star Wars-ified corner of it. He read my crappy fan fiction and I read his less crappy actual fiction, and a bond formed.

Internet dating before match.com. That’s how it happened.

Now, Matt I actually did meet on match.com. Well, kind of. I had a profile up there, he stalked me, but he hadn’t paid for premium service, so he had to find out my IM name in some other creative, stalkery manner instead of contacting me through the website. Stalking as a demonstration of love: it actually usually works. At least if you’re me.

Jesus Wept

My family moved from one coast to the other the summer before my freshman year of high school. I was crushed, naturally, but resolved, too. I was going to shed the image of the pee-scented overalls and the wackadoo haircut and be cool. Beautiful, even. I’d grown my hair out and cut my bangs to match my cooler friends’ bangs, and I had some really short white shorts that made my legs look long and thin. When I looked in the mirror, I could almost imagine the woman I was going to be, and that the awkward girl was gone.

That was the summer I met Joe.

I met Joe at church. You’d think this would be a good thing. Church is generally a good place to meet wholesome gentlemen. But Joe, I knew from the start, had a streak of bad hiding under those long, blonde curls. He was like an angel, all white teeth and gold hair and big arms—except I knew he wasn’t really an angel because I didn’t meet him until halfway through the summer, when he actually decided to show up to church one week.

Also, he was seventeen. My mom didn’t like that he was seventeen. My dad didn’t much care, as long as he was allowed, finally, to tease one of his daughters and embarrass her horribly in front of every boy she ever brought home. Lucky me; I got to go first.

Joe and I spent the rest of the summer circling around each other. For my part, I thought this would be another one of those unrequited love things. I would sit back and admire from afar, he would never notice me, and eventually he would go away, or I would go away, or another boy would come along that I could fall in love with instead… from afar, of course.

But when the school year started, Joe asked me out. I honestly, truly never saw it coming. I thought he was teasing me. I think I may have actually laughed. But he wasn’t kidding. And I fell headlong into a relationship with the not-really-an-angel from church.

Jesus wept. I imagine my mother did, too.

It’s Not the Falling; It’s the Landing

I am somewhat of an expert at falling in love. I have, in fact, been falling in love quite well since the tender age of eleven.

Third grade brought me to the realization that I was, if not the weirdest kid on the planet, at least in the top six. Ronnie Castle, who came to the Halloween carnival as an outhouse, was perhaps weirder. But not by much. And people liked him because he was funny weird. I was just awkward weird.

So I admired boys from afar. It was easier that way—I could pretend there was a chance, and they didn’t have to remind me what I freak I was. I became an unrequited love aficionado. I knew all the rules: staring and sighing heavily, finding his picture in the yearbook and drawing hearts on it, asking all my friends for information on him on the sly, thinking about how my first name would sound with his last name, and, of course, completely running away if he ever so much as glanced in my direction, because no good could come of an actual conversation.

The first poor kid to get this treatment was Henrik in sixth grade. Henrik was from Norway and did not even know I existed, which was probably better for him. Had he known what a torch I carried for him, he would have blushed, as only a Scandanavian can blush, all the way up to the roots of his white-blonde gorgeous hair.

By eighth grade, I had moved on to the greener pastures of Michael. Michael was the lead in the spring musical, which was a revue of Bye, Bye Birdie and Grease. He was Conrad. He was Danny. And even though I hadn’t seen either movie, I listened to Summer Dreams on repeat the entire spring. I would have given anything to be the girl lead opposite him. But that kind of thing doesn’t happen to girls who accidentally drop their overalls strap in the toilet… after they’ve used said toilet… and before they’ve flushed said toilet. And I was that girl.

The one great thing about unrequited love, though, is that if I was admiring from afar, my guy was always perfect. He never said anything hurtful to me, or touched me in a way I didn’t like, and, really, he wasn’t even ignoring me, because it was my doing that had made me invisible to him. Compared to love with two people, unrequited love is kind of a breeze. It’s the falling, without the landing.

The Opening Lines

Joe, 1995, age 14:

“I can tell you like me.”

To an incredibly stupid 14-year-old like I was, who’d had a crush on the beautiful blonde Adonis all summer long and had been expecting it to be nothing more than unrequited love, “I can tell you like me,” was akin to a proposal of marriage. I was his.

Shane, 1996, age 15:

“Did you seriously just say ‘kiss me, you fool’? Because I can. Unless you were kidding. Were you kidding? Do you really want me to kiss you?”

I was actually kidding. “Kiss me, you fool,” was a line from a commercial my siblings and I thought was extremely hilarious and I just assumed that Shane would have seen the commercial, too, and also found it hilarious. But then after he got all flustered and couldn’t tell if I was serious or not, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d been kidding. So we kissed.

Luke, 1998, age 17:

“Does this mean what I think it means?”

Luke and I had been flirting all summer. Well, he’d been flirting and I’d been being stupidly oblivious to the whole thing. Mostly. Actually, truth be told, I’d sort of been leading him on. I thought he was cute and funny and I enjoyed spending time with him, but I never really meant to take it further than that.

But, as we stood in my parents’ foyer and I realized I’d been hugging him a little too long and resting my head on his shoulder, my “holy shit” moment came. In the span of 3 seconds or so, I convinced myself that I did want this relationship to be more than a friendship, and so I affirmed Luke’s suspicions that this meant we were now something more.

Matt, 2001, age 20:

“I usually don’t do this on the first date, but I feel like we have such a connection.”

You’d think by the time I reached the age of maturity (20, of course), I would have recognized the line. Luckily for me, he wasn’t just trying to get in my pants and he actually meant it, in his emotionally turgid sort of way.

As you’ll note, the theme in all these encounters seems to be, “Ramona is stupid.” It’s not a flattering picture. Every time I’d just begun to get myself under control after months or years of a roller-coaster long-term relationship, a new opening line would pop up and I’d go right back to Stupid Land.

I know lots of people who take good, long, healthy breaks between relationships. I know teenagers who have never been on a date in their lives. They are perfectly normal. I was not. At age 20, I hadn’t been single for more than a few months since I was 13.