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The four of us just looked at one another and burst out laughing.
It took some time to explain to him that one of us was an American from Florida, one was a Finnish-born Swede, one was a Canadian of Welsh extraction from Toronto, and the last was a Yugoslav-born African-raised New Zealander -- and that we had all come to Vancouver simply to have a party with people we had never met in real life before and whom we only knew as 'electrons' from a shared newsgroup on the Internet.
It was a while before he spoke again.
Cyberdance: Preface
ALMA: I Married an Ax Murderer.
Well, so half the world seems to think - the kind that lives with the Internet under duress and look at it askance as something not quite to be trusted. Meeting one's friends on the Internet is suspect. As for a lover, a partner, a mate… hoo boy. The jaws of Hell fair gape for those who try. In Internet parlance, where acronyms rule, these people are the MEGO kind - "My Eyes Glaze Over". This is all incomprehensible and people who live on the Internet as much, if not more, as they do in real life, are strange, are wacko, are, in other words, Ax Murderers. I mean, how on Earth are you supposed to tell who or what is hiding behind an email nickname? How can you possibly fall in love with… with… with electrons?But people can, and people do.
The other half of the world, the folks with some acquaintance with the Net, respond to an explanation of how my husband and I met with either a knowing nod or an enthusiastic bounce followed by a similar tale involving their close friends or their kin. There are more marriages out there with an Internet origin of some sort than most of us think. The odd thing is, given their ethereal beginnings, these relationships - once they have passed the initial hurdle of the first in-person meeting - tend to be steadier and last longer (well, at least I think so) than the common-or-garden variety where courting couples often initially respond to one another on the basis of a shallow surface attraction ("Look at that BABE!") and then progress through an awkward series of carnal hops into the matrimonial waters where the two partners, with leisure to actually talk to each other for the first time, discover that they have nothing in particular to talk about.
The thing about the Internet, of course, is that one meets the mind and the spirit before one is distracted by the Barbie-doll face or the washboard abdomen. The Barbies and the washboarders don't hold one's interest long in the cyberworld - unless, of course, they happen to be both cute and profound - a combination so rare that it could be classified as a museum piece. There have been cases I personally know of where a first meeting resulted in a recoil as one of the partners realises that the person he or she has been conducting a passionate on-screen love affair with actually looks like she holds down a steady job as a closer-down of events which aren't over until the fat lady sings, or whose eyes look like two misplaced minnows behind his coke-bottom nerdy glasses - but by the time a meeting takes place at all one is usually so versed in one's companion's soul that the body, if the relationship is a real and valid one, fails to make any difference.
I once described myself to the man who is now my husband as a sundial in an overgrown garden -I have a somewhat large nose, overshadowed by an uncontrollable cloud of curly hair. He laughed, and disagreed. He could not see the nose and the mop. All he could see was the woman who made him smile a hundred times; and besides, maybe he likes old and unkempt gardens with mysterious sundials. There's a mystery there to be explored.
The validity of outer trappings, when it comes to the Internet, is diminished - beauty remains, as always, in the eye of the beholder, but in this instance the parameters in which beauty is judged are different, deeper. One looks beyond the shell. One has to, simply because the shell, instead of the first thing one sees, is the last. I fell in love over the Internet with a man who is a lot older than myself and whom I may well have overlooked (and it would have been my loss) if we had first tripped over one another in real life. One grows up with such a preconceived idea of one's ideal mate - but one forgets that knights in shining armour are not only rare these days, they are mightily inconvenient. It is one of the mysteries of the Internet that it offers something far more real than real life in this particular sense - because it cuts right across illusions. The dream of the cyberworld becomes its own reality.
The rituals of courtship are both very different in cyberspace, and almost unbearably familiar at the same time. It is painfully obvious that two potential partners and lovers are dancing the same dance which has characterised human pairing up for thousands of years. At the same time, we need to learn a whole new set of steps for what a friend once called the "cyberdance".
Falling in love is easy. Falling in love while adrift in space and time, and piloting your craft to a safe landing in what the Net people call RL (or "real life") is a different thing entirely. And yet… falling in love is easy. Remains easy. All that the Internet has done, in effect, is allow one to look farther and faster - a glorious thing if, as I found out, one's soulmate happens to live in a different country, or a different continent.
All the same, it's kind of nice when you finally get the chance to whisper "Good morning" to the man you love instead of typing it onto a computer screen. Although it does seem to be unlikely in the extreme that two partners separated in this way would ever actually consummate their relationship in any sort of physical way, it does happen. And I have been very fortunate that it happened to me.
The road has been a long and not entirely smooth one. My cyberfriend (at the time) and husband-to-be saved practically every email we ever exchanged, and there are hundreds of pages of this stuff stored in his computer. We printed these out and spent hours shuffling happily through them, smiling, snuffling occasionally, with one or the other of us chipping in with "Hey, remember this?" and "I wonder you ever talked to me again after that remark…" There are many places where now we seemed to have been prescient - and this too is one of the gifts of the Internet, that we knew each other so well so quickly.
The paradox is that I Married an Ax Murderer who is practically a Buddhist in his respect for life and won't kill an ant unless it is discovered in the food that he is about to eat; he stops the car to gently remove a gecko trapped on the windshield wipers before the tiny creature is whipped away into the traffic in the slipstream of a car moving at speed. He loves life, and he loves me, and I am profoundly grateful for the cyberdance which gave me the chance to meet him.
This is our story - and the story of the brave new world in which we found the oldest story ever told, and made it our own.
Cyberdance: Love, Sex and Romance on the Internet
© 2002 Alma A. Hromic Deckert & R. A. Deckert. All rights reserved