Falling in love Online: How Technology sparks Romance

This post first appeared on Outlish.com

The Match.com ad that appears every time I log onto Facebook boasts that one in five relationships start online. I don’t know how true the stat is because I have plenty of stories to tell from my failed attempts at online dating, but that’s beside the point.

My longest relationship started with a single voicemail. What followed was an intense three-month courtship that occurred primarily online. I went from New Orleans to New York, followed by an extended stay in Trinidad and my love interest at the time lived and worked in New Jersey. After our first date in New York, we kept in touch via e-mail, MSN messenger and phone. Somewhere between that first date at South Street Seaport with the bridges of New York behind me, and marathon MSN conversations, I fell in love.

As outlandish as it may seem, given the advances in communication technology, falling in love online is easy. Human beings are social animals. We need to feel connected to those around us, and technological advances like Skype, Facebook, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Twitter and WhatsApp, have undeniably – in the past five years – become an integral part of the way we communicate.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly corny, being constantly in touch with someone, while sharing your innermost thoughts and feelings, can, and, in many cases, does lead to strong feelings of attachment and attraction. Mark Sanford the former governor of South Carolina, who resigned after admitting that he’d had an affair with an Argentinean woman, said in his public apology, “It began very innocently, in just a casual e-mail back and forth. But then it became much more than that”.

Commentators on the Sanford scandal theorized that “by removing the body from relationships, electronic communication makes romantic love less animal. The lovers’ discourse becomes simultaneously more childlike and more intellectual, more spiritual”.

My own experiences seem to support this theory. It is impossible for me to not feel some form of attachment to someone I talk to every day, regardless of the forum where the conversation takes place. Admittedly, I also feel it is easier to talk about certain key issues from a distance, without the distraction that physical attraction can pose. It’s all too easy to put the cart before the horse when getting to know someone, if you’re always around him/her physically, especially when the chemistry is undeniable. This, of course, is the catch 22 of online love affairs. If you’re not around someone all the time, how can you tell if they’re telling the truth?

Like most women, I use the frequency and quality of a man’s communication with me to gauge the level of his interest, so I’m not sure whether being face to face with someone would help much. Technology doesn’t have to be a barrier to getting to know the essence of someone. This may be especially true for the generation of young people growing up at a time when Twitter, Facebook and texting are established means of communication. For these people, their online presence is a seamless extension of real life, not a made-up alter ego.

Communication ‘apps’ can help bridge the gaps of distance and time that come built into a lifestyle, where we spend the majority of our waking hours at work. After a ten-hour workday, I rarely have the time to chat for an hour plus on the phone, but it is possible for me to get to know someone fairly well, and vice versa, if like me they’re glued to a computer screen for at least eight hours every day, and a phone is almost an extension of your hand. An hour-long conversation can now be broken up over the space of several hours on the go, and – if you’re an adept multitasker, you may be able to cover more ground.

Additionally, the immediacy of text, online conversations and video chats – especially those of a sexual nature – can enhance the physical attraction in a relationship. Sexting is so popular because it makes it easy to create the fantasy of what you want to do to someone, or have them do to you, when you’re not staring them dead in the eye. By the time you do see them, the longing and anticipation has added a significant edge to the seduction ritual.

If you’re still a non-believer, my only advice is don’t knock it, until you’ve tried it. Sexting is awesome, and I have it on good account that strip teases via Skype can help make the time apart in long-distance love affairs less of a burden, and keep some men on the straight and narrow.

Most modern technophiles, myself included, can’t survive more than a few hours without access to the Internet, the devices that keep us connected and the accompanying apps. This only gets worse when you’re in the initial stages of a love affair. We can often be found staring at our phones, checking our e-mails and Facebook compulsively to see if our love interest has responded to a message, or rushing home to make the appointed Skype video chat. Sometimes this is done at the expense of people around us.

In spite of this, I don’t agree with critics like The New York Times reporter Virginia Heffernan, who wrote after the Sanford scandal, “ur current bind is with offline reality — real life. We’ve been cheating on it, all of us, for a long time, living in a wireless fairyland where we r all so giddily hot.”

As social creatures, I think we are biologically programmed to form bonds with people around us.  Given that modern life is in many ways inherently solitary, I don’t see the point in mandating that only certain forms of communicating and connecting are valid at the expense of all others, especially if it’s in a vain attempt to avoid being hurt. That’s not how civilization progressed to this point. Loving relationships are challenging to create and sustain regardless of the medium where they are formed, so why not let technology help?

A Reflection on the movie “Friends With Benefits”

The following reflects my older sister Nzingha Sibongile Job’s thoughts on the summer movie “Friends with Benefits” starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

I found myself tearing up while reminiscing on the events of this movie. I guess it reminded me of my own struggle to accept the reality that I have not been able to earn the undiluted, unafraid love of a man who could also satisfy my physical desires.

I found myself thinking of Mila’s cute-as-a-button Ukrainian-American face, distraught, cracked like a Picasso cubist painting, after having valiantly struggled to be tough, vivacious, not needing compliments or emotional support; after bending over herself like Elastagirl of The Incredibles to protect herself from her own arguably natural feminine desire to mate for life, finally snapping back into that inexorably vulnerable female shape we all know so well.

I found myself fragmented into selves: the young, spoiled one who cried, inconsolable, unaccepting of reality, bitter and sore at her parents and elders who were not bothered to devise a pseudo-marital scheme by which she could find a way to acquire physical companionship on a regular basis when her hormones felt most ready for it, and so exposed her to the degrading option of friends-with-benefits proposals, and to the horrible realization that without seriously considering them, she could possibly never experience a nude hug before her death; the one who, jaded, sneered at that self, saying “Grow up. What did you expect? An arranged marriage? Then you’d be crying about how they should have given you your freedom”; and the one who said: “I don’t even want to write about this—everything I can say has already been said, and I won’t add anything to this that isn’t already there.”

I was right not to go into my past prosaic soliloquys about the insensitivities of current elders and parents to their children’s vulnerability to the sexual imperative in a whole new world where marriage isn’t done as quickly after puberty as it always had been until about a couple hundred years ago. I recently got a dog, and I’ve learned it’s just hard to prioritize anyone else’s needs as highly as yours. We’re naturally self-interested.

And I think a lot of the time those of us who are disappointed about love are simply not self-interested enough. I feel that way about myself. If I had been a better, fuller, more intensely coloured flower, some best bee would have insisted on having me for his own exclusive nectar source by now. What’s more is this: if I had been a better, fuller, more intensely coloured flower, I would feel happier, prouder, more content with myself, satisfied that even if no one ever claimed me, and I was indeed ‘born to blush unseen’ and ‘waste [my] fragrance on the desert wind’, that I was also, indeed, quite a bloom to reckon with.

Further, it’s not unattainable, my perfection as that bloom. There’s a way for me to be the best I can be. And achieving it can make me more visible to, and more capable of dealing with, anyone who really deserves to claim me. I’m happy to take the opportunity to make myself feel better about myself and to make myself a better relationship partner on my own.

But when it comes to sex, I feel that I am a whale…I can go very long periods without it; I must eventually come up for it. Everything in society and religious upbringing tells me to feel guilty about feeling like celibacy is a long period of holding my breath, or exhaling, and feeling that sexual intercourse, properly done, is like an opportunity to inhale fresh air, to be held, naked, vulnerable, not out of pity or concern, but out of love for myself and love for life itself.

I would prefer to experience it married, safe or supported, in the event of a pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease. But there is no one going down on one knee for me. And my ‘type’, a not at all unreasonable profile involving health, hygiene, fitness, intelligence, manners, and financial acumen, is usually taken, or not in my geographical area. In the meantime, my face, buttocks and breasts sag a little more each year, and self-served orgasm tastes more and more like a hot dish gone cold.

My spoiled hopeless romantic idealist inner self may look at romantic movies or read romantic books and think: “All these beautiful rapturous images, shall I experience them when I am old and grey? Shall I never feel love as thunder rolling through my chemically stormy youthful frame?” And tears come to her eyes, while my jaded inner self says: “Oh what melodrama. Small t’ing. It is what it is. You just wasting energy bothering with any of this.  When yuh dead, it ain’t gonna matter how many orgasms you had or with whom, just what kinda work you leave behind, and that will only be to a very few people anyhow. It is what it is.”

At the end it all comes down to what you believe about life and its nature. If you believe in an afterlife where you’ll go to hell for fornicating, then no amount of torturous skin hunger will cause you to fornicate. You’ll tell yourself as many times as it takes that it’s only for a time. And it probably would be, because, as we all know, this, too, shall pass. But if you believe that life is to be lived now, while you’re conscious of it in the temporal realm, and since you don’t know your day or hour of departure, you’ll try to breathe in as much clean air as you can…nobody likes inhaling smog, and we all know it’s bad for you. But intimacy, the real kind, the kind that lets you be yourself and inhale your love of yourself and life, in body and mind, that’s something you won’t be able to pass up for an indefinite amount of time, with no reprieves or guarantees. It would be like forgoing breathing.

Celibacy: How both Sexes Handle It

The sex drive is probably one of the strongest biological urges that human beings have. As a single, attractive woman living in New York I get propositioned for sex all the time. In fact I often joke with my friends that if I slept with every man who found me attractive, and wanted to sleep with me I’d be considered a “whore” by societies standards. Beyond the obvious societal repercussions which I have no desire to deal with, I have always been acutely aware of the role hormones play in the process of attraction. The sex-act can be an immensely pleasurable experience that binds people together, but it can also become a source of frustration and stress. I’ve tried to present my views on this topic in a balanced way, and look forward to reading your comments. As always thanks to the Editors of Outlish Magazine for continuing to give me a platform.

Sex is a drug, and in today’s liberal culture, where hooking up and friends with benefits situations dominate, celibacy has become an almost irrelevant practice. In fact, on more than one occasion, when I asked if people still practised celibacy, several of my friends assumed it was a trick question. This left me with the distinct impression that very few people on either side of the gender divide bothered to practise abstinence. 

The general consensus of most of the men I spoke to was that some men probably practised celibacy, but it most certainly could not be a choice. At least one guy cheekily admitted, “I practise it, but I’m not very good at it”. Another joked that it was something that only HIV-positive people need to concern themselves with, because “man always want to buss they gun unless they little funny”.

Most women will admit that the decision to abstain or indulge in sexual intercourse is far less clear-cut. Several of my female friends admitted to practising celibacy at one point or another in their life. This was either by force because they lacked men who were interested in them and suitable options, or by choice. In fact, a close female friend chose to reveal on Facebook that she had been celibate for over a year, by saying, “I’ve been celibate for one year, ten months and five days. That’s 684 days – 59, 097 600 seconds.

See you won’t die if you don’t have sex”. I even know someone who’s been celibate for six years now, and seems to be unperturbed by what others would consider a sexual drought. 

Some of my jaded readers will no doubt choose to believe that anyone who says they practise celibacy is a liar. I mean, if ordained priests can’t deny themselves, how can anyone reasonably expect unordained men and women who have willingly sampled of the “forbidden fruit” to resist temptation? 

I think women learn how to go without sex for a variety of reasons. Most of us are acutely aware of society’s double standard, when it comes to sex, so much so that we’re willing to brand the women among us who freely indulge as much as they like, with whomever they like, as whores. 

Some women, myself included, often torture ourselves over when to give up the proverbial ‘nookie’, especially when we really like a guy. Give it up too soon and he thinks you’re ‘loose’, wait too late and he’ll think you’re a prude, or even worse frigid. Indulge on a regular basis for pleasure and companionship with a friend, and you might just find yourself addicted, nursing a broken heart when he decides to move on, or just frustrated when you realize you’re not his only source of sexual comfort. 

I’m fairly certain that no guy grows up being told to keep his hand out of the ‘honey pot’ or goes through the mental gymnastics mentioned above, before engaging in the sex act. This may be because men – generally speaking – worry far less about becoming attached to their horizontal conquests, although this is not to say it doesn’t happen or that some men don’t practise abstinence. 

In conducting research for this article, I spoke to two men who admitted to being celibate, one of whom insists he hasn’t had sex in almost two years. His reasoning was simply, “Using people is wrong in my head. I also wonder what the person I end up with would think about my many escapades when it came out”.

Personally, I don’t know too many virgins, and firmly believe that people shouldn’t be judged harshly about their previous, sexual decisions. Being good at anything takes practice after all. I do, however, think there’s a case to be made against treating people like “sex toys”. Sex involves way too many hormones for there to be no emotional consequences, for one or both parties involved. As CNN contributor Dannah Gresh asserted recently in an article on today’s hook-up culture, “there’s nothing biologically brief about a hook up”. 

As a single woman, I envy my coupled-up friends, and those who are able to do the “friends with benefits” thing, because sex is an immensely pleasurable experience. Going without it is like detoxing from caffeine or alcohol, except the withdrawal symptoms never go away. 

In my virginal years, I remember my mother telling me that the sex drive was a sleeping giant best left alone, until you had a regular supply (marriage), because once you woke him up it was impossible to put him back to sleep. 

It may be easy to say that Tupac was giving advice for life when he sang, “keep your head up, legs closed, eyes open”, but it is a far harder to practice it on a sustained basis. This is especially true for professionals, especially women who live alone, and for whom real, human contact – like hugging – is a rare occurrence. For individuals in that situation, sex is often the only way to get ‘closeness’ and the occasional back rub, which can make the decision to be celibate, torturous, lonely and depressing. 

Everyone I know who practises celibacy has their own coping mechanisms that may or may not involve the use of toys, porn, erotica, and, in my case, caramel frappachinos and extreme fitness challenges. Admittedly, my mostly celibate lifestyle doesn’t fit nearly as comfortably as my friend who boasts that her “panties be locked up like the Dead Sea scrolls”; but like her I have no problem saying that I “ain’t gotta be hard pressed for sex to give it up”. 

Where the topic of casual sex is concerned, I don’t want to treat anyone like I treat my toy. Being treated like a sex object may be momentarily satisfying, but I think it pales in comparison to the uninhibited pleasure of communicating with someone you really like through sex. That’s just me, though, and, maybe I’m in the minority here. 

Celibacy isn’t for everyone, and although I don’t worry about STDs, pregnancy or messing up my headspace, I still won’t recommend my lifestyle to anyone else. In the meantime, I’ll keep sipping on those caramel frapps, hoping that some mad scientist will create a slow release pill that triggers the same levels of oxytocin and dopamine that orgasms do, so I can have all the fun without the attachment.

Proof that girls don’t run the world? – Socialization/Love; why do women wear 3+ inch heels

I love heels. In fact I’m really excited for the five-inch Colin Stuart pumps shown in the picture on the left to arrive in the mail.  Any fashionista, and I am by no means one, will tell you that shoes can make or break an outfit.  That said I think women wear sky-high heels primarily to compete with each other, and because men like women in heels.

Personally I love the reaction I get from men, and the envious glances I receive from my female peers when I’m stepping in some four-inch ‘puppies.’  When I asked my friends if they thought that women wore heels because they loved them; or to compete with each other, and better attract men I received a range of responses.

A female co-worker surmised that a “love of heels” is bred into most women at a fairly young age, and joked that  “to heel or not to heel” was very much “socialization by shoe type;” that high “heels equal awareness, posture and gives other people an impression of you.” Maybe there is an unspoken social convention, which presumes that sophisticated, classy ladies know how to wear and walk in heels, but tomboy’s and less accomplished women don’t.  Suri Cruise, the five year-old daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes reportedly has a shoe collection that’s worth $150,000, and includes several shoes with little heels. I’m not too sure that I want my five-year-old wearing heels, but that is another discussion altogether.

Frankly the higher the heel, the slower you have to “step” because there is no graceful way to walk hurriedly in four-inch ‘puppies’ unless you want to risk breaking your ass, and frankly wiping out ain’t cute.  An older male colleague who is already married suggested that women used heels as a confidence booster, and that men sometimes thought, “damn she looks good; or damn she just looks ridiculous.” Clearly there is also a presumed difference between dressing up, and dressing appropriately for the occasion.

I wasn’t surprised when one of my closest Trini guy friends insisted that men love to see women in heels because it “lifts the booty.” A tall girlfriend in suggesting that competition and or men wasn’t the reason I and most other women wore our heels asked, “wouldn’t you wear heels on a girls’ night or to a wedding or at times when you’re not planning on being checked out,” before admitting that she only wore “heels with dresses for weddings and or fancy nights.”

The Trini guy I mentioned earlier quickly responded with this question: “A time when a woman isn’t planning to be checked out?? Really now???”  I found myself agreeing with him because I’m only 5 ft. 4.5 inches and I think tall people always get noticed first, but I digress. Another girlfriend joked, “Clearly something is wrong with me, because I’ll rock slippers in the club normal. My booty and legs can do bad all by themselves.”

They most certainly wouldn’t at some clubs in New York, but that’s another story. One of the more thoughtful male responses I received suggested that the shoe situation with women was “a female pecking-order thing that is worse, not better, when men are absent, and isn’t necessarily taught. This is not to exonerate male-gaze contributions, but to note that things are more tangled and indirect than we sometimes think.”

A self-professed feminist countered by saying that “heels look great. They really do but it’s so oppressive. Women can’t dance at parties; their toes are all banged up…beauty culture is learned. Who wakes up and decides to walk in stilts, put a plate in their lip, and powder on their face and neck?”

She has a point, and admittedly there are very few occasions when I don’t feel as if members of the opposite sex are checking me out. Further I am well aware of how critical women can be of each other, and our fashion choices. I have distinct memories of being constantly chided by my mother and her youngest sister about my fashion choices during my “tom-boy” years growing up; because one never knew who you would run into that day, and first impressions counted more than anything else.

Nowadays my fashionista girlfriends keep me in check by threatening to disown me when they think I’m about to make a fashion mistake; and my mother considers my transformation from awkward tomboy, to confident young woman who can walk in skyscraper heels one of her greatest parenting achievements. It also doesn’t hurt that I have a minimum amount of fashion sense about the colors, and styles that work best for my figure.

Heels however just aren’t all that good for your health. Ask any woman whose twisted her ankle because she misjudged the distance between steps; or me when I’m rolling out the knots in my calves and thighs after a 5 mile run, and a night out on the town.  It is only my self-confidence, love of running, previous ankle injuries, and the fear of doing serious and permanent damage to myself that tempers my shoe addiction. Flats do nothing for my feet. There is also no such thing as fashionable comfort shoes because stores like Aerosoles don’t market to women below the age of thirty-five, and let’s not even talk about orthopaedics because they just scream I’m not sexy.

It’s against human nature and socialization to do something if there’s isn’t some kind of social payout involved.  A shoe can be a gorgeous creation but when I say I love my heels, its more about loving the way they make my legs look, and the reaction I’ll get when I pair them with shorts, leggings and or a cute dress. My older cousin actually calls me a “Jane-boy” because although I prefer reading, watching football (soccer for my Americans) and or working out to shopping, I have a growing collection of “come fuck me” heels and I don’t look like a “tom-boy” when I bother to get dressed up.

It may very well be a combination of factors that influences any woman’s decision to wear heels, but inevitably what wins out will be a matter of personal preference and upbringing. Some women embrace socialization so much that you’ll hardly find them wearing flats. Others reject socialization and choose strictly comfort whether or not they have ample physical assets to do the talking for them, and then there’s me. Ladies what kind of woman are you; and gents do you prefer your women to be heeled or not?