Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
And this secretive, private element, shared by both computers and cellphones, has enabled millions of coupled people to engage in seductions that would not otherwise cross their minds. These technologies make possible new kinds of infidelity, just as they have opened up a Pandora's box of porn. E-mail and cellphones permit romantic and erotic connections that were once deemed too dangerous because they were insufficiently private. E-mail in particular allows us to reach out and touch someone, to send an erotic tendril out into the world, without noticing the real edge of what we are doing.
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My introduction to the world of e-mail flirtation was innocent enough. Having accidentally sent a chapter of a novel I'm working on to an entire soccer news group instead of one of its members, I received a generous assessment of its merits from a female soccer fan whom I had never met. We exchanged e-mails and had a bet on an upcoming soccer match. When I lost, I had to buy her a drink. It never occurred to me to make a secret of the mild, very brief, and perhaps one-sided flirtation that followed. There was, as we say, no harm done.
But I began to wonder about the self-disclosing nature of e-mail. It is not news that this form of communication encourages a reckless abandonment of the usual social restraints and conventions. We have a feeling or a thought, and we hit Send long before our conscience kicks in. There is no one on the other end of the telephone, so our tendency to blue-pencil the mind rarely takes hold as it might do when there is instantaneous feedback. There are no envelopes to be addressed and no stamps to be purchased. There are no lines at the post office and no apparent consequences. Neither is there any need to delay gratification -- the gratification that comes with taking a little risk. The gap between feeling and acting is so tight you barely notice it.
Just as important is the form of e-mail -- an erotic dance, more spontaneous than letters, more crafted than conversation. The sometimes false intimacy of e-mail opens up a new part of us, one that did not previously exist. It is the late-night flirtation that occurs at a time when once you would have been safely tucked up in bed or watching television. Or working.
Most important, there is rarely someone looking over your shoulder. E-mail offers the illusion of total privacy -- even if your partner does know your password. And it also provides a new -- and paradoxical -- sense of self. This self has global reach but is locally unaccountable. Hence the notion that what you do in front of the computer is, like the writing of a journal, something for your eyes only. This combines with the virtuality of the Internet to create a sense that there is both nothing being done and no need for anyone to know about it.
Within a year of getting hooked up to the Internet at home a cousin in England sent me some information about Friends Reunited -- a British Web site that connects old school mates. I signed up. And then, one morning in the fall, I logged on to Yahoo to discover that I had received an e-mail from an English woman we will call Louise -- a woman who was a teenage girl when I last saw her. Louise was one of those women that men dream about: the teenage crush that never really led to anything and that -- partly because of this -- never went away.
My e-mail flirtation with Louise began with polite inquiries about marital status, location, career, kids and so on. Within days the marital reports had become bitching and moaning sessions that read more like co-counseling than the casual gossip of old school pals. Within weeks I received an e-mail saying: "Do you usually have this effect on women?" And of course I knew that the answer was yes. I was well aware that it is always the words that do the dirty work.
I came perilously close to planning an affair, or at least something that would have been as close to an affair as two old school chums could arrange at a distance of 6,000 miles, when I realized that this semi-secret flirtation was getting out of hand. It was affecting my relationship with my girlfriend. I was waiting to send e-mails to Louise while I was with my actual flesh-and-blood lover. I was staying up late telling a virtual stranger the story of my life, while the person I hardly spoke to was sleeping in our shared bed. I told Louise things about my relationship that I should have been discussing with the person I loved. But the relationship with Louise was real, too, and in the course of our conversations we learned a lot about each other and gave each much support in times of trouble.
However, my definition of an "affair" is so stringent that it would test the morals of a monk. I have always said, to whoever would listen, that if you have lunch with someone you fancy and don't tell your partner, that's an affair. Affairs do not begin with kisses; they begin with lunch. Or something like it. So when you hide the shared meal and the excitement that came with it, you do so for a reason. Or reasons. You don't want to upset your partner. (Thus you know, in fact, that there is something to get upset about.) You want to keep it to yourself. Why? Because maybe some part of your mind is planning ahead and it doesn't want your partner to know that this lunch gig has started at all. Because one day, you hope, it won't just be lunch that you are hiding.
By these standards, my e-mail flirtation was already a full-blown affair. And when I realized that, I stopped it. Which is to say that I carried on sending Louise e-mails, but much less frequently, and with a new and more measured emotional tone. Most important, I began to think more carefully about sharing intimacies. When you share intimacies with one person, and keep that secret from another, you create distance. It is inevitable.
This kind of emotional mission creep, whether intended or not, is made so much easier by the new technologies of communication. One can lie about lunch with little risk of detection. One can suggest a date with an old friend, and whatever happens, nobody has to know except the two of you. A new two. The geographic reach of infidelity is now limited only by one's determination and one's budget. And if the ex-lover, or new friend, happens to be within driving distance, well then -- you can make arrangements from the computer on your desk at work. Or on the phone, in the car. And nobody -- not your partner, and certainly not your boss -- need know about it. The inbox and voice mail -- both guarded by those enigmatic, secret passwords -- patrol the porous border between what we say and what we do.
As I saw those possibilities unfolding before me, never stopping -- not yet -- to consider that I was not the only one who might have some new toys to play with, I thought long and hard about the Buddhist concept of Right Speech. Right -- or skillful -- speech is that which is truthful, helpful and timely. What would Buddha have done with his e-mail account? Not much, very likely. Because a great deal of what passes for communication via e-mail is neither truthful, helpful nor timely. And the Buddhists have certainly got their assessment of karma dead right: Wrong speech tends to boomerang on you and smack you in the mouth. Hard.
The very existence of cellphones and e-mail seems to have provoked a new abundance of speech, most of it purposeless and time-wasting, and some of it harmful and dangerous. Both technologies must surely have increased the amount of gossip in the world. And as Ernst Bloch once observed: "Gossip is anger sent to the wrong address." I didn't want a cellphone, because I wanted less speech in my life, not more. And e-mail was beginning to look like little more than an opportunity to do the writing and the talking that I should have been doing elsewhere.
But my efforts to rein in the distancing and distracting effects of the computer were poorly timed. I had left it too late. On our return from a Pet Shop Boys concert -- an evening that began with her telling me to stop staring at her, in the car, and that ended with my asking her to tell me what the hell was going on -- my girlfriend told me that she wanted to leave. Which of course sent me straight to the computer to tell Louise all about it, in a fit of panic and longing that obliterated all my clever talk about karma and moral standards.
Of course I asked my girlfriend if there was someone else. She said no. I asked her again. She said no, again. And I believed her. Sort of.
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