Not so many years ago I had a summer romance that was different from other summer romances.
We met at a party, then he returned overseas and we spent several months locked in a dopamine-frenzied storm of messages. Sometimes hundreds a day, not respecting timezones or the real-life fragility of our connection.
A lot of the messages had a curious quality. They lay somewhere between thoughts and spoken words – a kind of intimate hinterland that extends just beyond the borders of your head and heart but is mostly comprised of things you keep to yourself. As I found out, when you’re on a roll with someone, you both type quickly and have super speedy internet, these old citadels soon fall.
What do I remember about that summer?
It was hot but I didn’t go to the beach much because the glare of the sun on my screen made it hard to text.
I was constantly anxious about leaving an area where I couldn’t charge my phone.
At parties I left half-finished conversations with friends because I heard a ping from my pocket or my phone would shake on the table. I’d pick it up and go into the bathroom for ages, just so we could finish that conversation about Obama.
At another friends’ beach house, I pretended I was sick, slipping her proffered Panadol into my pocket so I could spend the afternoon in my room, messaging him. I wondered if it was just another version of falling in love, or if it was not love, but a form of addiction.
I listened to music he sent me and read articles he linked to; and then debated those articles on WhatsApp, which would lead to more links being sent. Show me the links and I’ll show you the man: I discovered he was the libertarian child of Christopher Hitchens and Ayn Rand. Mostly towards the end we just fought about politics.
Cat Person, the short work of fiction in the New Yorker which went viral this week, struck many chords. Yesterday a male friend said,“Yeah, isn’t the messaging great? Sometimes it’s the best bit.”
And he’s right. Sometimes it is.
Some people after a holiday romance have pictures of themselves holding hands on the beach, posing by a lighthouse, chinking glasses of frosty margaritas, glowing with love and sunburn.
The pictures I have are a bit different: selfies but also fragments of poetry, song lyrics, voice recordings, links to long-form pieces in the Atlantic or Paris Review, large slabs of Paul Keating’s speeches, lines from Philip Larkin’s poetry, photographs of photographs of the work of Nan Goldin or pictures of where I was when I was messaging him – all the meals left to go cold, all the beaches I didn’t swim at.
Links, message, photo, link, link, photo, video, audio file, link, message, message, message, message – all summer long.
Maybe it’s getting to the stage when a relationship won’t be judged on actual memories but on the size of the memory used to accommodate it.
“He was so great,” some girl might sigh to her friends. “He took up a whole gig in my hard drive. I had to delete apps to accommodate his messages and photos on my phone.”
I wonder if it was the same long ago, when people were away at sea, or in prison, or at war, and there were only letters. And the letters were ardent and bold, and sexy and intimate, and just like texting and WhatsApp are today?
This is how it is now – and it has nothing much to do with Tinder and dating apps, but everything to do with phones and the way these devices can be used to accelerate intimacy in incredible, beautiful and terrifying ways. You don’t need to be nearby to feel close; sometimes being far away is better. You show a curated side of yourself for sure but, in the glow of the Messenger screen, with the lights out, you can also be vulnerable and tender in the way that you can’t be in a bar on a second date.
I am not young but I straddle that divide between romance pre-internet and what it is like now. People like me are centaurs – or at least that’s how it feels – part person of the old world, part person with device.
I’ll still never forget sitting next to some blond boy on train from Geneva in 1998 and knowing everything about him by the time we got to Barcelona. We spent two days together – walking the city, talking nonstop. He left me with a Hotmail address on a scrap of paper that I lost.
It was a real connection, and those few days were for a long time my private shorthand for what I meant when I talked about romance.
They could make a movie of what happened in 1998 (and did in Before Sunrise) – but how do you capture what’s going on in 2017?
Of course romance is all about emotional connection and physical attraction – that never changes. Whatever generation you find yourself in, it’s all about the thrill of discovering someone else who you quite fancy, someone who says to you, “I’ve never told anyone else this – but …”
The private, enclosed walls of a WhatsApp or Messenger chat thread can feel the same as two people sitting in a room.
Yet there is some commentary around whether all of this virtual stuff is even real – as though the people involved in this sort of message maelstrom are somehow victims of a scam, that the feelings they have or the intimacy they feel is fake.
It’s not fake. It’s just a different kind of real – and one we are starting to grapple with as a society.
This way of courtship is not something you plan. No one ever thinks, “I would love to exchange thousands of text messages with this one person then have sex with them twice and then read back the texts and simultaneously want to die of shame.” There is nothing there in real life except for the discombobulating feeling that this stranger has hacked your inner hard drive, and the ache in your heart at the thought that if the history of your chats were published it would be the greatest love story of all time.
It wasn’t just that dude, that summer. It’s a lot of afternoons in hotel rooms on warm days in thrall to messages coming on to the screen, and not caring if it’s sunny outside and there are things to do. It’s missing your bus stop because you are staring at the bubbles and the dots of an emerging message. It’s texting all through the night every night and not minding the fatigue.
And it’s the best thing ever until you meet properly IRL and then it’s the worst thing ever, and you think, “Oh my god, I have told this virtual stranger too much.”
You hope the messages will just disappear into the digital dust. You hope he didn’t take screenshots.
I keep waiting for our culture to catch up to how we are living now, but it’s so slow.
