Long Distance Love

I was 10 years old when I first saw the movie 'You've Got Mail' starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  I didn't have the internet at home at the time and personal computers were not yet as ubiquitous as they are now.  The only computer we had at the time was an Amstrad CPC-464 with a green monochromatic display that had a command line interface with no mouse or anything that even remotely resembled Windows.  It was February 1999 and the idea of the internet was still a novel concept to most people, although the hardware had been around for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't even a decade old yet; for a young gay boy like me who felt isolated and disconnected from the rest of the world aware that other gay people existed just at a distance, the internet provided something of a fantasy for me, a way that I could one day connect with others who were like me.

That feeling was prescient as in time I would not only go on to connect with others like me through the internet but I would go on to contribute, moderate, and even for a time help as administrator for online LGBT communities that connected people from across the globe.  My horizons certainly expanded throughout the process but the idea of falling in love with someone online as is the plot of the movie was still alien to me at the time, something that didn't happen in reality, until it did.  Falling in love with someone you have not even met is a very strange concept to explain to people who have never experienced it, but for those that give it no value I would simply ask you to reflect on your life and ask yourself how many times someone you barely knew or never met personally passes away only for you to grieve for them as much or even more than people who you had met. 

The trouble with this whole concept isn't whether or not you can fall in love at a distance, that one is a given, we can even fall in love with things that can't love us back or can never understand what we feel for them so that argument is fruitless to debate; the real issue with this concept is whether or not you fall in love with the person on the other end or your perception of them.  When you have not met someone in person there are a lot of things you miss out on, for example body language, emotive cues, facial expressions, and the ability to know when there is something that they are not telling you, either because they are holding back out of reticence or deception.  Being able to see one another on a Skype call is not enough to remedy all of these things there's still scope for limited perception.

Despite all of these complications there are ways to overcome the difficulties that they create.  First and foremost the importance of communication should be stressed, coupled with honesty.  There needs to exist trust in one another to be open and honest and to share everything not just the good and the positive things that you think will make you look more appealing but also the bad and the negative things that you think might make them lose interest in you, those are often the hardest things to share.

On the other hand one of the biggest complications that can arise is the misalignment of perception where both people fall in love with their idea of the other but those ideas do not reflect reality so that when you eventually meet it's as if you are meeting a completely different person, the one you imagined doesn't actually exist.

I feel like the idea of online dating not just as a means to connect with those in proximity and arrange to meet but the actual idea of meeting people at a distance and developing a friendship long before you actually meet is something that has grown in popularity in recent decades.  I think the advent of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns that forced people to rely on remote connections also did a lot to expand people's perceptions as to the validity of online relationships and even just friendships with people you've never physically met.

Even just online dating as a concept I feel the LGBT community in particular was more open to the idea of at first than society in general.  From its nascence I remember distinctly sharing stories of who I had met with my gay friends and they in turn sharing theirs, swapping suggestions for sites to use in the days before smart phones before dating apps grew in popularity.  At the same time my straight friends always found the idea strange and unusual and most professed a reluctance to even meet someone they found online through social groups with no romantic inclinations professed at all.

Those people have since shifted their mentality as technology has advanced, those who once professed complete opposition to the idea now sing the praises of apps like Tinder.  Times change as they say and if the behaviours of the LGBT community can be taken as a precursor to what wider society eventually embraces then the idea of long distance dating as not only acceptable but actually preferable might be an indication of what is to come.  We are yet to see the lasting impact of Covid-19 and whether the perceptions nurtured in lockdown are maintained.

I should point out here this is in regard to developing relationships and connections that are more meaningful and substantive than simply finding someone to have a sex based encounter or sex based relationship with.  Both of these things too were again not only seen as normal but seen as preferable within the LGBT community and for many this is still the case, I don't think this will change any time soon.  The likes of apps like Grindr are not providing anything new or novel, websites existed that did the same thing before smart phones.  Likewise there have been risks associated with these practices that predate Covid-19 and people did it anyway so I don't see that having any lasting impact on behaviour, society as a whole may be experiencing its first pandemic to in a century to significantly impact people's lives but Gay people have been living in the shadow of the HIV pandemic for decades.

The idea of meeting someone explicitly for sex and moving on after is something that generally we accept as just another part of life, although there are divisions within the gay community in particular as to the morality of this behaviour, something which I don't have an issue with at all, I have done it and if I wanted a sexual encounter I would do it again I'm just interested in something more at this point.

This complacency with the ease of access to sex I think drives many in the LGBT community to seek out unrealistic expectations from potential relationships and potential partners.  The feeling that there isn't as much urgency leads to the pursuit of Mr Perfect and those endless grids of guys and their profiles encourages the idea that if they're not perfect there are others to consider.  There's nothing wrong with the idea of searching for something that feels right, and not wanting to compromise or not wanting to settle for a relationship with someone that isn't what you would expect, but the rationale and the reasoning for that has to come from a genuine feeling of discomfort or inadequacy, if it's simply borne of the idea that it's not perfect and that you want to seek out that perfection then you're probably not going to find it.

I've mentioned this concept in previous posts, perfection is inhuman by definition.  If you seek out someone who is your definition of perfect, you're probably never going to find them because no human will ever fit that definition.  It's like searching for someone who has wings, humans don't have wings, you're never going to find someone that does.  Whether or not a relationship works for you has to be based on what is, rather than what could be.  Don't judge it against a hypothetical future that might never happen, judge it for what it is and ask yourself if it makes you happy, if the answer is no then maybe it's time to move on.