Love On The Internet

NYtimes July 23, 2000

Old Flames Flicker Brightly, Electronically

By LINDA LEE

YES, I have had seductive e-mail relationships with men. But I never got in over my head until I started e-mailing old boyfriends. Suddenly, I had Internet relationships with two men simultaneously, both of them former lovers I found on the Web. With one, I was like a frisky Doris Day. With the other, I was Catherine Deneuve. With both of them, I was in trouble.

One lives in San Francisco and is tender, handsome and caring. He is also poor and practically mute. (Actual quote: "I'm a nonverbal guy, that's just the way I am.")

The other lives abroad and is rich, articulate and loving. He is also married. (Actual quote: "I'm a married guy, and I'm not going to have my wife whacked. She's too much fun. You just have to accept that.")

Let's rewind here. Pay attention. According to USA Today, 61 percent of American singles will look for a date on the Internet this year. Most will go to sites like match.com or 2ofaKind.com. There are no figures on how many will look up old boyfriends, and probably for good reason: war casualties don't tend to respond to USA Today surveys.

One woman warned me: "Don't do it! You'll see. Men never change." What she didn't mention was that some women never change, either.

The Internet has made it easy -- too easy -- to locate old friends, classmates and flames, what with the proliferation of nationwide telephone directories and powerful search engines. The Internet reaches everywhere and is at once intimate and false, seductive and unreal. But an e-mail relationship also means being alone on Saturday night. Guests leave, children grow up, dogs die, and the e-mail addict is still there, pounding the keys, and it's always Saturday night.

It is possible to go back through a mental Rolodex and type in the names of all your boyfriends, starting with the one in fourth grade who kicked you in the shin. That isn't what I did, however. I looked for one old lover intentionally, and the other one pretty much fell into my lap. I swear I don't do this as a hobby.

Case Study A.: the one who got away. It is 1977, and a handsome, well-educated inventor named A. has been squeezed out of my life by a more successful man. Let's face it, I mistreated him because I had met someone more glamorous. By the time the relationship with Mr. Glamour Puss ended badly (if you call his death "ending badly"), my old boyfriend, A. (not his real first initial), had moved from New York to San Francisco. I tried looking him up in the phone book. I tried electronic databases. No luck.

Perhaps A. was dead. Why else would someone drop from sight? Yet, I never gave up. Two years ago, I idly typed A.'s name into a search engine, and there he was. With his own Web site, no less, promoting a new invention. I wrote and he wrote back, tersely, that he was married and had a 4-year-old daughter. We e-mailed another time or two, but the letter I remember came two Christmases ago. "My wife threw me out," he wrote.

This created an unpromising image ("loser" came to mind), but I was glad for the news. There were more e-mail messages: long ones from me, short ones from him, the e-mail equivalent of grunts. Somehow through that raggedy correspondence, and without ever actually talking on the phone or exchanging pictures, we made arrangements many months later to meet at my country house. I looked up from my desk and there he was, this good-looking, six-foot, gray-haired man, standing in my driveway, holding his daughter's hand.

Thanks to his erratic e-mails and inability to express himself, he had arrived four hours early. He caught me with dirty hair, no makeup and in sweat pants -- not my most fetching look, and at my age, I need a lot of fetching. I considered ducking under my desk. But he was already staring at me through the window and smiling. I went outside. I was not slim. I was over 50. And I hadn't combed my hair. But he thought I was beautiful. He didn't say it, of course. But he looked it.

Our first kiss? He and I were walking toward the house when I reached up to touch his shoulder, to tell him that I was sorry, all those years ago, that I had gone for that other guy.

He turned and, before I could say a word, closed in. It was a tender kiss, full of promise. There were two other kisses, each more elaborate than the last, and then lunch, and then he and his daughter drove off.

More e-mails. He wrote sparingly. "What's with this guy?" I asked my friends. "He's not a writer," they said. "Pick up the phone."

But the phone wasn't a great success, either. Finally I e-mailed him to ask when we were going to see each other again. (It is true that I may have thrown in some erotic language, perhaps a description of my feelings about those kisses to move things along.)

Finally, he e-mailed back to say he was coming to New York. But (more miscommunication) a week before his arrival, I still didn't know if he was coming to woo me or make a courtesy call.

I called him. "Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "Pick me up at the airport, and we'll go straight to your place -- and then to bed."

A younger woman might have been insulted. I was thrilled at this show of confidence in a 56-year-old man and immediately went into a paroxysm of self-improvement. This time when A. saw me, he was not going to catch me unprepared.

We met again in Utah, at a film festival, and again in San Francisco. There were romantic, amusing encounters, one after another, including a trip to the Napa Valley. We lolled around in his skid-row apartment. What could be better?

A. was the polite kind of man who opened doors for me. What he wouldn't open was himself. He would hold my hand while we drove in the car, but he wouldn't reach out for me emotionally. Still, I thought all was perfect -- except three things. We lived on separate coasts. A. was terrible with e-mail, with any kind of communication. And then there was Valentine's Day.

He had called and asked a question that any woman would find romantic: "What's your ZIP code?" Then Valentine's Day arrived, and this is what he sent: a postcard. Let's consider this for a minute -- a postcard. With a handwritten inscription that violated the basic rule of Valentine's sentiment. It did not contain the words "I" and "you."

Worse, he now had a rival for my affections, a man who had sent four dozen long-stemmed red roses, and to the right place, my office.

Case Study B.: the cad.

In 1976, a New York society figure introduced me to B. We spent two wild days together, and then he left for another woman, an old girlfriend, before returning to his wife (again, this was the 1970's). B. behaved badly then, just as I had behaved badly with A. And yet, B. was the perfect man, witty, charming, handsome, egotistical -- all the bad things. A completely dangerous man. Just my type.

Twenty-four years later, B. was in the news. Someone suggested I get in touch with him for a project I was working on and provided an e-mail address. I wrote, "Do you remember me, I used to work with. . . ." He replied, "Of course I remember you."

Two weeks later, he was sending roses to my office on Valentine's Day. Everyone assumed they were from A. ("He must have really liked the stilettos," a co-worker said.) But the flowers were from a man I hadn't touched in 24 years and whose voice I had forgotten. They were from a man who wrote me e-mail.

But what e-mail! He dallied with me. He teased.

He charmed. He quoted Yeats. He praised my (as yet unseen) beauty. He told me he couldn't live without me. He said, on the card that came with the roses, "What we are doing now is far more erotic than anything we have ever done before."

Is it possible to fall in love with someone who writes you love letters but whom you haven't seen? A man you do not remember having sex with, although he insists you did and provides long remembrances to prove it? Well, duh.

With B. I learned that it is possible to read between every line of a letter, perhaps between every letter of a word. To analyze the position of x's and o's at the end of a message (and invent some new ones).

I learned that it is possible to fight, cry, make up, all in e-mail. I also learned that the "forward" function provided an easy way to share e-mail messages with friends.

Their opinions could then be sent back to him for further commentary.

His letters said things like, "I'm full of heartache and longing for you. I've been pursuing you and I want you." He could spell, too.

It was like any relationship. We both had our insecurities, mostly about looks and the ravages of time. Worse, the possibility that we would actually find each other boring if we met. And there was jealousy. When I went out one evening, he complained. "I was very blue not hearing from you for hours," he wrote.

The first time he picked up the phone to call me was late at night, after we had had an e-mail argument. Pity for me his voice was like Pierce Brosnan's (B. is an American ex-pat). Then he began picking up the phone and calling me if he believed we had had a misunderstanding involving so much as a word, perhaps even a comma. But we still e-mailed.

He professed to love me, no matter what I looked like. " 'Women north of 50, not slim, not young . . . and tired' happen to be my special fancy," he wrote. "The only important change in you that I can fathom has nothing to do with lines or pounds or years. I've already added those trifles on. You're exactly as I expected, though even more intense."

How does he know what I look like now? The Internet had taken care of that too. I had scanned a photograph of myself and sent it to him as an e-mail attachment. In response, I got this: "How exciting to have a magnetic blob of pixels waiting for me to kiss open! How maddening that I can't manage it. The file extension is .max, which Windows doesn't recognize nor do my other image-making programs. Now if it was .jpg, or .gif, or .tiff."

Even that kind of talk seems seductive, especially when followed with, "Pity I can't tear it open with my teeth."

What about A., you ask? I continued to e-mail A., and to call him. I even tried to hint to A. that there might be a B.

But A. seemed resolute in his uncommunicativeness. A. used the word "darling" once in an e-mail, but what he wrote was, "Darling, as they say in the movies." (Wake up, A., some people say it in real life.) B. threw "darlings" around like Tic Tacs.

A. was a man you could grab, a single man who might change a tire for you. B. was a married fantasy, passionate but noncorporeal. And he had a history of being a bounder. Perhaps he was just working in a new medium.

B. told me he had changed. "I gave up trying to be fascinating to women a long time ago, except with you," he wrote.

Seduction? The man could write a textbook. An unmarried man has to be careful how he uses the word "love." A married man can use the word with abandon. "I don't have to tell you that I love you, but I will," B. wrote, "because I do. If that admission blows up your life or mine rather than improves it, we're greater fools than I believe we are."

Just when the women's chorus around me was turning against him, he did something they all admired. Admired even more than the roses. He set up a stock trading account in my name, put cash into it, and began managing it for me.

Suddenly the women's chorus was singing a different tune. "Ooooh," they said.

Of course he was distracting me from A.

Should I pick the romantic, impossible, passionate and assertive (married) suitor from abroad? Or the down-to-earth, pre-verbal, hurt and flat broke (available) candidate in San Francisco?

I asked a well-known psychiatrist, Dr. Edward Hallowell, "Doctor, what should I do?"

Here was his response (by e-mail, of course): "I am always a sucker for the Jimmy Stewart character who can't say his lines but has good character and a heart full of love. On the other hand, maybe Mr. Rich and Effusive is not just a superficial high-intensity-seeker, sure to dump you as soon as he lands you. Maybe he has depth as well as passion and roses. Maybe he is Mr. Right! Who knows? Keep them both. Enjoy the attention. Let them both exert themselves. It is good for them to do this. It is good for you, too." Yes, doctor.

Of course, this is advice that works only in a cyberworld. In a cyberworld you can keep both men, without fear of complications. In a cyberworld B. doesn't have to leave his wife.

And it turned out that only one wanted to exert himself: the married one. A. dropped out of the race when I began insisting on some pronouns. B. and I met four months after we began writing. It turns out that in person he is just as romantic, charming and persuasive as he is in e-mail. And more fun to have a drink with in person. He says he is leaving his wife. Of course, he hasn't put that into an e-mail, so I can't be sure he means it.

But I have one last resort. If B. betrays me, if it turns out we've been on a joy ride and not headed for a happy ending, I have the ultimate threat: I delete thee, I delete thee, I delete thee.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/library/style/weekend/072300email-love.html
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