Gregory Smith* had yet to kiss Susan Olson* good night or run his fingers through her hair. But he could do something else with his fingers: type to her. Greg was a library and information-management student in Adelaide in South Australia, she worked for a real estate firm in Kansas City, Missouri, and they were carrying on a romance by way of the Internet. “We write letters constantly,” he said, “and exchange our thoughts on newspaper clippings, music, all manner of things. About the only thing we haven’t exchanged are marriage vows.”

The outcome, as I began this chapter, wasn’t clear. If the Smith-Olson affair was like many on the Net, they would pull the plug long before all the typing destroyed their wrists. “For every good story,” Greg said of love on the Internet, “there are at least 100 bad stories—people meeting and realizing there’s a major difference between virtuality and reality.” A few months later, I decided, I would check back in with Greg and Sue and report the results at the end of “The Electronic Matchmaker.”

For the moment I was optimistic. Greg and Sue had been at this for a good two years; they spent several hours a day pouring out their thoughts to each other, Greg at his UNIX workstation, Sue at her lowly Packard Bell computer. He had bought her a diamond ring on a layaway plan; she was giving him a ring. She would fly Down Under at some point, and then the next summer, Greg would to go to Kansas City and meet Sue’s family, including her father, a retired auto worker who, ah, had a few surprises ahead.

I think of good people like Greg and Sue when I read the tacky, hacky stories about unhappy affairs online and Net sex. While many politicians and reporters delve into the sleazier areas of the Internet—and, yes, regions can look like Silicon-era Sodoms—something wonderful is also happening on the Net. It’s connecting lovers with uncannily matched interests and values. Remember, the Internet teems with more than 12,000 newsgroups. If you’re quirky and picky, if you insist on a lover whose hobby is Esperanto, the international language, try soc.culture.esperanto. If you want to find a fellow Peace Corps alumnus, you can choose from among several newsgroups and lists. If you’re a Libertarian stalwart and insist that your girlfriend be nothing but—well, the search may take longer.

Some philosophies just don’t hold out as much appeal to women as do others. But that has not daunted a smart young Libertarian in California, Eric Klien, who started what may have been the Internet’s first matchmaking service, an operation later taken over by Electric Classifieds. Match.Com offers a long questionnaire that should appeal to many of the detail-oriented habitués of the Internet.

Whatever your taste, the Net probably has a dating service if that’s what you want. Operating with a French address on the World Wide Web, Babb’s Personals shows up with a photo of a green-eyed, dark-complected woman, and a number of free, anonymous ads in French and English. Christie’s Internet MatchMaker claims to reach more than 14,000 users in seventeen cities. On the Net, too, you’ll find HIV Positive Dating Services (“Meet other positives, negatives, and neutrals locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally”), Web Personals (“Now over 4,200 different visitors each day!”), and Virtual MeetMarket (“I believe that the people who browse through here, and more importantly the people who bother to publish personals here, are somewhat intelligent and Internet-savvy enough to know the difference between FTP and FTD—you know, the flower delivery guys?”).

I found some of the catchiest ads on Virtual. One showed a beautiful twenty-five-year-old brunette in Los Angeles touching an empty set of casual clothes labeled “Your picture here?” “I’m looking for somebody who’s [sic] personality has a shelf life longer than a month,” she said, and California spelling notwithstanding, she clearly deserved just that sort of person. A graduate student, hungering for a “sweet SWM of my dreams,” inserted a picture of a knight in armor. Seeking “a Scandinavian beauty,” a graphics designer from South Carolina posted an almost magazine-quality layout with photos of himself and his cats and even an aerial shot of Charleston. The prose wasn’t the most imaginative, and his Scandinavian requirement was rather limiting, but in a flash the ad showed women what kind of life he could offer them. Other possibilities exist on the Web. Instead of just saying you like certain musicians or artists, for example, you might write Web links to take people to an area with sound or graphics files.

The best matchmaker is the Internet itself, with all its ways of bringing well-meaning people together. If Greg married Sue, this would hardly be the first Australian-American marriage born on the Net. Australia is the e-mail capital of the universe, or at least the romantic regions thereof. Until surpassed by the United Kingdom and Canada, Australia had more Net connections than any country except for the United States. Recently the Aussies’ telcom people started charging institutions for net connections according to the amount of use, and that just might crimp future Gregs and Sues. But at least in mid-1995, Australia’s e-mail laurels remain unthreatened.

American women love Australian men because they speak the same language—more wittily than we Yanks do, of course—and because they all carry huge knives with which they can defend their girlfriends against crocodiles and muggers. Isn’t that so, just as in the movies? American men worship Australian women because we know they are unappreciated down on the sheep ranch, they’re literate, and have brilliant careers ahead of them. Don’t knock stereotypes if they help bring the right people together.

The film Crocodile Dundee may or may not have been on the mind of Laura Goodin when she was wandering through soc.culture.australian. She saw “a message from an Australian composer studying in the U.S.,” who told of “an alternative tune to ‘Waltzing Matilda.’” Laura asked for the music. Within months the Aussie proposed, right over the Net in the same newsgroup. “Congratulatory messages came from all over the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.” Today Laura Goodin and Houston Dunleavy are married and living together in the Washington, D.C., area, with a baby on the way. They exchanged more than 1,500 messages during their courtship, not to mention countless sessions of typing together in Teletype fashion, just as Greg and Sue have done. It is not the same as talking the old-fashioned way but can save enough in phone bills to pay for an engagement ring or maybe a more powerful computer. “A long-distance relationship is hellish,” Laura says, “but the pain is eased somewhat by the Internet.”^[7.1]

This isn’t just happening on the Internet itself. When a New York City woman was testing a service that became America Online, marriage was the last thing on her mind. Nevertheless she ended up married in Virginia to a lover she met via e-mail. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, met his wife on CompuServe, where, supposedly, she had sought his advice on coping with a liberal professor. A chef and a substitute teacher met on Prodigy and flew off to Las Vegas together, thinking they would enjoy the video poker if nothing else; they won $4,000 and each other.^[7.2]

A psychiatrist has even written a novel about online relationships, Virtual Love. “E-mail has been called the singles bar of the 90’s,” Dr. Avodah Offit told the New York Times. “And that concept intrigues me a lot. The traditional ways that people meet now do not allow much access to each other’s minds, and that has not led to enduring relationships.” What’s the best place to find out about your potential spouse? By sitting silently through movies or boozing it up in noisy, smoky nightspots, or by sharing intimacies over the modem? “I find people are more open on e-mail,” she says. And I agree.

The Internet, to be sure, is hardly a romantic nirvana, and although this chapter will be positive about net romance for the most part, I’ll mix the praise with some lengthy warnings. Some sections of the Net will please fundamentalist preachers no more than will the red-light areas of New York or Calcutta. From alt.sex.bondage I called up a digitized photo fit for the Marquis de Sade. The caption accurately read, “Japanese girl tied to rack while master pours hot wax on her breast. Looks very painful and her face shows it.” Just about all of those posting to the forum are male despite the heterosexual orientation of the typical messages. This area of the Net is about as woman friendly as Hustler. Offensively, too, the Internet also comes with sections devoted to bestiality, and, yes, discussion of adult-child sex. In every case, of course, society must distinguish between shared fantasies and real acts. (As indicated in chapter 6, Exonian laws aren’t the solution—parental vigilance and access-control software are.)

A more serious worry, from the viewpoint of women hoping for romance on the Internet, is the locker-room attitudes that can show up even in some respectable areas. Consider the cause of this: the numbers.

If you go by one network veteran, fewer than one in twenty of the early Netfolks were female. By popular belief, maybe a tenth of the people on the Net are female, a far smaller percentage than on other services such as Prodigy and America Online. The truth, however, is a bit more complicated. John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell of Texas Internet Consulting, which regularly tracks the demographics of the Net, reported in the May 1995 issue of their publication Matrix News that according to a survey in October 1994, 64 percent of Netfolks were male and 36 percent female. And among educational institutions the percentage of females was as high as 41 percent. Borders between the Internet and commercial services are breaking down Berlin Wall fashion, so you can expect the Internet to show an increasing amount of female influence.

The old stereotype, however, that the Net is male dominated, would seem to hold up for the moment. Even the virtual dating services tend to have far, far more men than women despite, in some cases, better terms for female customers.

The reasons for the ratios are world famous. Computers in the past were to girls what trucks and catchers’ mitts were also: the province of boys. Thousands of men in the computer industry are still oblivious to the existence of another sex. When I write popular-level computer books, male editors often demand that I stick to the technology rather than show how people use it. Most women, however, recoil from the Internet and other high tech unless they see practical reasons for bothering with UNIX commands and similar horrors; they have been raised to favor humans over gadgetry. Let’s hope that the old fears vanish as more women befriend computers and programs grow easier for both genders.

Meanwhile, however, on some areas of the Internet, women can be treated like females in Asian countries that pamper baby boys but all too often let sickly girls die or even kill the fetuses. A few men ignore female Netfolks except for purposes of humiliation, sex, or combinations of the two. Although messages from women tend to draw more replies on the Net than those from males, the end results can dismay; one man reportedly welcomed a woman to a discussion group, launched a political dialogue, then shifted in a nanosecond to a request for a swap of nude pictures. Women tell of weirdoes stalking them via e-mail, flooding their Net accounts with unwanted messages. One victim, as reported in Mother Jones magazine, suffered “an untraceable e-mail ‘bomb’ containing hundreds of sexual and violent messages, the mildest of which was ‘Shut up bitch.‘”

At the same time women on the Internet can enjoy less of the sort of attention they desire. Some Netfolks don’t pay as much attention to the public messages of women, and besides, female Internauts may not want to post anyway in some areas, given the outright insults and sarcasm that may await them. Women seek harmony and compromise; much of the Net thrives on controversy.

My wife, who, like most of her gender on the Internet, hates flame wars, has even run across a newsgroup whose people venture forth to start arguments in other groups. What is a hobby to some men can be an antisocial practice to women. Many women hesitate to speak up on the Net, whatever the topic under discussion. Disturbing statistics come from Gladys We, a graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Writing in the magazine Virtual Culture, she says at least four-fifths of several hundred postings to alt.feminism were by men. She tallied figures almost as lopsided in soc.women. “Only in soc.feminism,” We writes, “amid accusations of censorship, were there comparable numbers of postings from women and men.”

Given the obstacles that women often face on the Internet, then, it is amazing at times that any romances happen there. When they do, yet another danger arises—the risk of missed cues. A friendship online may cause either sex to ignore mismatched words and gestures that might put them on guard. One Los Angeles women met her boyfriend on a BBS and suffered a disaster that could just as well have happened by way of the Net. He got her pregnant, begged her not to abort, married her, and made life a real hell, not just a virtual one, until they divorced.

Worrisome, too, are the eternal tensions that go on in cyberspace between sincere Befrienders and not-so-sincere Gamesplayers, who the former have trouble detecting. The Befrienders seek friends and lovers; the Gamesplayers would just as soon toy with a human as hack a program. An argument might even be made that high tech attracts more than its share of people who thrive on impermanence. You do not last long in computers if you believe that Pentium-level chips are forever, or that 28.8K-bps modems are more than throwaway technology in the general scheme of things. Faster chips, higher speed modems, and new girlfriends or boyfriends are sure to come along. That’s the mind-set. Let’s just hope that the girlfriends and boyfriends will last.

“I am burning with a need to talk with you, to share with you my fears, my joys,” one Australian women cooed via modem to a man in the Canadian province of Alberta. Within two weeks her ardor did not just cool, it inexplicably froze. “This is the very last time I will write to you,” she said. Very possibly—we can’t say for sure without ESP—the Australian woman was a Gamesplayer.

Gamesplayers enjoy at least one big advantage on the Internet. They can post their electronic want ads through computers, known as anonymous servers, that strip their names and other compromising identifiers.^[7.3] And replies can come through anonymous servers. The same technology used to protect privacy can let Gamesplayers fool victim after victim, and even mask genders. Particularly in fantasy games on the Net you can never be sure if you’re typing to a woman or a man who just wants more attention—abusive or not. What’s more, for the skillful there are ways to forge messages to unsuspecting neophytes.

Another negative is that the Net can be as helpful to adulterers as to the moral and sincere. A techie has just poured out to me a story of the kind that Carson McCullers would have written if she had fixated on the Internet rather than on the American South. His wife, the mother of two children, has been using the Net to cheat on him in a massive way. She befriended two alcoholics by way of her modem, the marriage counselor says he has done all he could, and now comes word that she just might have the AIDS virus; I hear it’s too early for a conclusive HIV test.

If sexual excitement is the only goal of certain Netfolks, and if the crowd in alt.sex.wanted is too creepy, some professional women just might meet their needs. As noted earlier in this book, a little outfit called Brandy’s Babes advertised on the World Wide Web—complete with hints of more than just visual stimuli. The babes are apparently off the Net now, but some would say that successors are inevitable. In limited ways the Net and the world of professional sex are much alike: both have their jargon and, for those who seek it, their anonymity.

Both worlds are rich in eccentrics. For example, I recently ran across a woman in her late forties who was about to bear a baby with a computer scientist she met on the Net “an hour before April Fool’s Day.” She says the child was accidentally “conceived about two weeks after meeting ‘in the flesh.’ We are having the baby first. Then we will talk about marriage on a serious basis. I’m delighted at the prospect of being a mum at last, and I am not your average clunky woman at all. I generally feel much better about myself. I introduced Tom to sex, and he says he had no idea how cuddle-deprived he was. He’s now quite addicted to me.” Tom and his computer are now part of her household; like many Netfolks he can use his modem to work virtually anywhere, which in some cases is yet another advantage of online romance.

Like most denizens of the Internet, the e-mail lovers just mentioned are well educated. And, although the woman was between jobs, Netfolks are normally at least affluent. If they are students, their parents are middle class or better. While the price of Internet service is coming down, and while access is free in some cities and at many American colleges, the Net doesn’t exactly teem with welfare mothers.

So what other patterns emerge among lovers who meet through the Net? “I haven’t done a study of the personality curve, the introvert-extrovert ratio,” Avodah Offit, the psychiatrist who wrote Virtual Love, told me, “but my experience is just the opposite of what one might expect My ‘high user’ contacts are all very sociable types who hate being out of contact with others at any time of day or night. Of course my correspondents are not generally engaged in romance with me, but they do write to others online in a variety of relationships.” My own observations suggest that while many net.lovers may be introverts, her thoughts would hold true.

Judging from lovers whose photos I’ve seen, the plugged-in couples are neither more nor less attractive than the world at large. But the plainer ones can use prose to compensate for looks; this is a medium where words are everything.

I hope that the people’s love letters don’t just vanish, because the output of some Netfolks can be charmingly Victorian in style, feeling, or sheer volume. “My family took it pretty hard at first and were a bit skeptical, especially my Mum,” says an Australian college student who fell in love with an American more than a decade older than she is, ”but then I gave them some of the early letters to read, a pile of 100, the only ones I had time to print out, and the next day my mother came up to me and said, ‘I am very happy for you. I am glad you have Frank.’ I was waiting for the ‘But,’ but it never came.” A New England woman, who married a fellow clarinet player she met on the Internet, says he once showed her a $1,000-plus telephone bill. That’s Love, capital L. Maybe the nineteenth century is alive in some quarters, whatever the medium, voice or e-mail.

Below I’ll tell stories of Greg and Sue; a bachelor who was looking for a woman who wouldn’t treat him like “a peripheral”; and a man who, to his distress, found himself cuckolded more easily because his wife was on the Net.

Adelaide was where Greg Smith majored in library studies at the University of South Australia. It was a graceful port and state capital with a Mediterranean climate, a population of a million, the Torrens River in the center, and swarms of college students from three schools. Named for Queen Adelaide, the wife of England’s King William IV, the city dated back to the 1830s. Kangaroos still hopped around in the countryside, but Adelaide itself was both urban and urbane. It was full of churches and bars alike, along with trendy shops in Rundle Mall and elsewhere. The State Theater put on Shakespearean plays at an internationally known festival center.

Not surprisingly, Adelaide has been described as the Boston of South Australia. While some young locals may shrug off the place as too churchy and sleepy, others might disagree. Adelaide in many ways is a young person’s town—a good place to meet the opposite sex. Greg Smith, in fact, did find women in the corporeal world around him, but the relationships never took root, and in the early 1990s he was still on the lookout in the bars (“universities are great for this”), the parks, the buses, the mall—you name it. He had his attractions. Greg, in fact, was on the handsome side, if you went by the digitized photo and other information conveyed over the Net. He stood six-foot four, weighed around 190, kept in shape by walking, and had thick, dark brown hair, and a winsome smile.

“I’m a physical person,” Greg told me. “I like to be with people. I like ‘reading’ people for body language and all that.” From the very start he was aware of the perils and limitations of the Internet in such areas as love. You had to trust the words of strangers, not sharing their own reality. “Relationships are established where one party is totally sincere and all that, and the other one is just getting a laugh out of it.” Just the same, he could not resist touring the Internet and the bulletin board to which his international connections led.

Young people like Greg Smith, who sought out new places on the Net, whether bulletin boards or electronic libraries, were vaguely like the Jack Kerouacs of the ’50sof the ’50s who liked bumming around the United States for its own sake. Some would describe the high-tech Kerouacs as “net surfers.” But the phrase “net surfing” has become so trivialized in the media that perhaps we should return to the Kerouac analogy.^[7.4] Kerouing, not surfing. Stark differences, of course, existed between the international Internet and the American towns of On the Road, the famous Kerouac novel. Greg had spent some time in the United States when he was ten years old and loved to keep up with American sports, but he was very much a creature of Australia, with a distinctly Aussie flavor in his accent and values. Nor was he a rebel in the true Kerouac tradition. You could be a library science major and still soak up the culture of the Net; you didn’t have to hop on and off freight trains and risk poverty or a severed leg.

In fact, while hooked into an established institution such as a corporation or a university, you just might do better than if you had to buy all the gadgetry yourself—just so you didn’t flunk out while you were partaking. A teacher might even encourage your wanderings. And that was how Greg ended up on the Net for the first time in 1992. He found himself logging onto electronic bulletin boards all over the planet, with bizarre names such as “Badboy’s Better BBS System” or “Chatsubo.” He was at least partly drawn to such places because they were so much like neighborhoods or small towns. Each came with its own set of friendships, love affairs, and feuds that could reach an intensity even greater than those on the discussion areas of the main Net.

The woman who married Rush Limbaugh is said to have exchanged tart words with Limbaugh on CompuServe at the start of their relationship, and the same happened with Greg and Sue. They did not attempt an alt.personals-style romance. Via Chatsubo he and she were just patterns of dots on each other’s cathode ray tubes. In fact, the two even butted heads over the question of whether certain people were abusing computer resources.

Sue, it should be noted, was not a true technophile; she could fire up a modem and use easy UNIX commands and that was about it. Even so, the two shared much else. Greg was around twenty at the time, just a year or so older than she was. Sue was a college student, at Northwestern Missouri State University. “I like her intensity, her sarcastic wit, her humor, and her, I dunno, just her way of seeing things,” Greg would say of the Sue he came to know. “Politically we’re very similar, as regards political policy and all that. Our tastes in music are close. Our pleasures are drawn from simple, similar things. For example, we are both mad about long walks, NFL football, curling up in front of fires, walking in the mall, playing in the rain, and on and on it goes.” Sue had been thinking about teaching, among other possible careers (political work and diplomacy happened to be others), and she enjoyed museums. Greg’s father had taught Shakespeare once, and his mother had also been a teacher. So while nothing Oedipal was at work here, Greg might well be more comfortable with a woman who shared familiar priorities.

Just as important, both Greg and Sue could breeze along on a keyboard and say plenty online. In the near future, people might be able to speak into a microphone with those at the other end seeing words pop up on the screen, but for the moment the Net was friendliest to good typists, especially those who could write well, as Greg and Sue could. They could almost be playwrights, the way they loved stage directions such as “Hugs” and “Wave good-byes.” If a feeling occurred to either, they could transfer it from their brain cells to the keyboard and make the recipient see their thoughts. When Sue sent a letter to Greg and me, it was obvious she wanted to get back to her private correspondence with him. She ended her note: “*hugs greg* hold your horses sweetie, I’m typing as fast as I can :-).” I could see that techie or not, Sue felt at home at the computer keyboard.

Without trying to woo each other across fourteen time zones, the two friends grew closer as they made the rounds of the BBSs on the Net. One of the boards carried a gallery of digitized photos, and Greg enjoyed Sue’s face. The look was American-Midwestern. Her light blonde hair flowed in a way that must have pleased him.^[7.5] She had green eyes broken up with what she has described as a “strange shade of yellow.” The skin was pale, the Scandinavian in her. In one of the shots she posed with a knee resting on a well-padded armchair. She wore a crocheted sweater, pants, and flats, and looked sexy but in a fresh, friendly way that would not have threatened a schoolteacher’s son. Greg, in turn, pleased Sue; in fact, even more so later on when she learned of his height; she herself stood five-feet ten and favored tall men.

Sue especially relished his sense of humor. “I could log in after a totally crappy day in classes and I’d have some corny e-mail from Greg that would send a smile to my face no matter what I felt like. He was, still is, and probably will be, the only person who can really cheer me up no matter what the circumstances are.” Love, however, just wasn’t on the minds of Greg and Sue in those early days. She had family and friends in Kansas City and counted on braving the frigid Missouri winters while she went to college. Meanwhile she had experienced her share of romances off the Net, including one with a shy friend who helped introduce her to the online world by suggesting that they type to each other. Sue may or may not have been ready for yet another relationship.

Even if she and Greg were just friends, they were paving the way for something more by slowly trading secrets about themselves. Lois Shawver, a California psychologist often online, warned me of the lack of trust that can afflict many long-distance relationships via computer. And yet paradoxically, the Net could bring people closer to each other. “It’s so easy to end a relationship,” Shawver told me, “you simply stop corresponding.” So “people seem to be more willing to take a chance and disclose intimately. That helps to create trust. I do think that also explains the medium’s ability to help people bridge cultural gaps.” It was all certainly true in the case of Sue and Greg.

Helpful, too, was the emphasis that they placed on the platonic at the start, without even meaning to do so. Is it just possible that horny young men and women on the Internet and elsewhere could declare a one-year moratorium on the raunchier forms of “cybersex” where men and women exchanged lewd remarks with each other, Teletype fashion, in group settings? Ditto for the online world’s many homosexuals and bisexuals. Ironically the aftermath might be more sex and better sex after some true friendships developed by way of electronic mail and one-to-one chats. One test of friendship, of course, might be this: Would a couple still write to each other if their Net connection ended? And Sue and Greg had passed so far: Her Internet account had vanished after she left Northwestern Missouri State University to work and go to school part-time. She ended up at an insurance company. Letters written on pulped trees, comic strips, editorial cartoons, music cassettes, material of all kinds, had traveled between Australia and Missouri. “We got closer and closer with each postage stamp,” Sue told me, “and believe me, there were a bunch. The post office likes me a lot.” Finally, however, Sue had returned to the Net, this time with a private account

On August 7, 1994, she had to break off an online chat to leave for work. “And I had one more question for her,” Greg recalled. “She asked what it was. And I asked her plain and simple, ‘Will you marry me?’ There was a pause of about thirty seconds, and she asked me if I was serious. I said, ‘Yes, never more so,’ and she said ‘Yes.’” Sue let her mother and a sister in on what was happening. She told certain friends, too, but not her brother and father. “It’s just going to be incomprehensible to them,” Greg told me, “that this could happen over a chunk of cable. Add to that I’m stealing away their last child, not just out of the home, or the state, but out of the country, and I can understand why her father is not going to understand.”

The same shocks would presumably await Greg’s mum and dad. “I think it’s more the medium than anything else. It’s way new to them, but for me it’s just part of the way we do things now. *Grin*. Mum’s department just got Lotus’ cc:Mail,^[7.6] and she was telling me about it and I was like ‘Yeah, so?’ but she was really excited about it.” Although Greg did talk to Sue from home, not just his university, he could do so without his parents knowing, because of the late hours he keeps, and because he lived in a converted shed out back of his house. I pondered the ironies here. Suddenly the Internet held out a new peril for parents. Having fretted about electronic pornography, Mom and Dad could now worry about children with more noble but equally secret activities. Parents might erase porno from a hard drive; it was not so easy to wipe out love as sincere and intense as Greg and Sue’s.

But had the two actually talked, telephone style, over a real phone? “We’ve had a grand total of one phone call,” Greg told me. Sue dialed him up. He said she’d kept putting it off because she was scared. “I know, I know,” he wrote, “we should talk more but I’m just a poor student.” Greg inserted the computer symbol for a smile to show he was kidding. “The one thing that surprised me about that call was how naturally the conversation flowed. I think it came from the fact that we are friends first and a couple second—that the pressure of the relationship was negated by the fact that we are such good friends. I seem to recall impressions more than anything else, like the lilt of her laugh, the timbre of her voice, the accent. We just talked about stuff—us, love, Clinton’s screwups in Congress, sports, everything. Very tough to put the phone down.”

“Still,” I asked Sue by telephone, “won’t it be quite a transition from the American Midwest to Australia?”

In a friendly, steady voice she told how she had overcome her hesitations. When Sue toured the local museums now, she saw graffiti on statues, and she said the neighborhoods were slipping. I thought of my grandmother’s old place in Kansas City years ago, how it had been block-busted by sleazes who frightened the whites away and resold the houses at handsome profits to Afro-Americans. Hotrods had roared up and down Chestnut Street; Grandma had been the last white holdout. The memory still enraged me. Although I hadn’t been to Kansas City in years, I believed Sue.

“My brother and sister are quite a bit older than I am,” she went on, ”and they both have children of their own, and I’m not crazy about the idea of leaving them to know their aunt through phone calls and video tapes. But I have no intention of staying in the Midwest just for my family’s sake.

“It’s my life and what I want to do requires more than the Midwest has to offer. I can fit in well wherever I go. And I’ve gotten a few books on Oz. From what I’ve read, I’ll like Australia just as long as I don’t have to wear one of those damn hats and worship Paul Hogan. I have Greg to worship. They may drive on the wrong side of the road and drink beer with lunch, but it’s not like I’ll have to learn a whole new language.” Besides, she loved the idea of the children growing up with an accent as delightful as the one she heard from Greg.

I asked Greg if his virtual romance with Sue had changed him. “It’s relieved a lot of the pressure that exists between myself and women, because it’s no longer that I’m looking for something more than friendship—I have a relationship which satisfies those needs and so don’t need anything from those friendships. What is most interesting is that change that I haven’t picked up but that other women must have. In the two-and-a-half years I’ve been at the university, I’ve been ‘hit on’ a grand total of zero times that I can remember. In the twenty days or so that I’ve been engaged, I’ve been hit on three times. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out exactly what is making women see me as attractive. And they weren’t friends or acquaintances either—completely unknown to me. Weird.”

So how much had Greg changed Sue? “A lot,” she e-mailed back. Sue said: “Being with Greg has taught me, if anything else, that my life doesn’t have any boundaries, be they physical or emotional or geographic.” This was more than lover’s mush; I noticed her use of “With Greg,” as if they were in the same room.

Asked for love letters—no pressure, let me emphasize—the two obliged with thousands of words just from their August 1994 writings alone. Mostly the letters were from Sue whose feelings were more conveniently preserved in digital form than were the letters from Greg. He wasn’t holding back: He was the one who had contacted me about their romance. What followed from Sue was more affecting than anything I’d read in a novel, for it was real, and I learned about it in the same way that Greg did, through a series of pixels on a computer screen. Reading this one message would help explain why she was willing to leave Kansas City; why she felt that, regardless of a father with heart trouble, she had felt free to move on; perhaps even why she was willing to share her life so openly with me through this book, for a chronicle was an affirmation of sorts.

New to me but old to Greg, the revelation did not come immediately. Sue’s August letters started out mainly with the routine, the glue of long-range relationships, the confirmation that she wanted Greg to know her life and likes. There was talk of food (“I love you more than I love munching on peanut butter and crackers”), diets (“I splurged on Chinese and probably regained the three pounds I lost”), art (at the Nelson museum she favored the impressionists), friends’ babies (“Barbara went to the doctor this morning to check and see how the baby was doing—she was about ten weeks along, and she had a miscarriage”), school (Sue was attending community college and could not resist sharing a few unabashedly corny jokes about her anatomy course), places to go on vacation (“Hey,” she said, in a discussion of Mount Rushmore, “do you Aussies get weird and chisel the faces of dead leaders onto mountainsides, or is that a distinctly American thing to do?”), and jobs (“this working full time and college at night is starting to wear me down a bit, but for the time being it’s what I want to do”).

Like almost any woman she planned. The word was that Greg should wrap some paper around his fingers and snip it off at the right place and send the results on to her so she’d know the size of his ring. And should it be silver or gold? They discussed pajamas. “I always thought it would be cool to share a pair of PJs with someone,” Sue wrote. “I’d wear the tops, you’d get the bottom. Okay, so I’m cheesy, but I guess it’s the American upbringing :). Shrug.” In her mind Sue saw the “really cool chapel in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my grandparents on dad’s side renewed their vows for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.”anniversary.” “I wanna get married in it,” she wrote Greg. “There’s a place where you can light a candle for a loved one and say a prayer to keep them safe. Well, I lit a candle for Barbara, and then I lit one for us. It felt weird to be in a church for a good reason. Seems that all the last ones have been for funerals.”

Another close friend had died some time back, and she reflected on the connection between that and a period of heavy activity on the bulletin board circuit. “When I logged on, I could just be some faceless person—no one had to know that my best friend was in the hospital room semicomatose because he had developed full-blown AIDS. There were so many people in my life that just up and left because Ralph* got sick; it was almost as if I had AIDS just by association. So I got online and became everyone’s favorite sweetheart.”

Then a signal fact emerged in the correspondence, something that explained who Sue was, and why Sue felt like Sue, although I believed that she and Greg would have wanted to be together even if her circumstances had been different. “I had just found out,” she told him, “that I had won a fight against a terminal illness while Ralph was losing his. I don’t talk about the fact that I am a cancer survivor very much, because I haven’t been in remission that long. It will be two years in September.

“All I want to do is make it to the five-year mark and forget the pain and the tears and the chemo and the treatments,” the letter said. “I want to look forward and be able to see a future without constant trips to the hospital, to days and nights when I can just be healthy and happy. I have a tendency to block out when I was sick because if I don’t think about it, I don’t remember it, and if I don’t remember it, I don’t worry about it coming back. If you ask, I will tell you everything.” Very early on in their friendship, Greg had known that the cancer was cervical; any children would have to be adopted. Sue ended the message by assuring him that she no longer wanted “the foreign policy degree from Georgetown anymore, or the chance to have the President asking my opinion on things.” Her goal now was Greg, an affordable flat, and a roomful of kids to teach.

The rest of her letters went on to discuss such cosmic questions as Sue’s love of long showers in the mornings, her tendency to roll around a little in her sleep, and Greg’s hatred of his cataloguing duties.^[7.7] “I love love love love love you,” he wrote, and heated up the wires some more while he and Sue dreamed of hugs at the airport, unstoppable passion, and a wedding.

“Know,” he told her, “that there’s a goofy, tall, dark, Australian, madly-in-love man here dreaming of you, and us, and the future.” I was betting right now that they’d make it to that South Dakota church.

He was a hacker, a true denizen of the Internet, and a poet at times. A word in one poem told all: “peripheral.” It means a printer, a modem, a scanner, or any other gadget that plugs into the main computer, yet is not one of the very most important parts. And that’s how some women on the Net saw him, the human equivalent of a printer, someone on the peripheries of their minds. He was among their friends but not their lovers. His own love went unreturned. So he called his poem “Song of a Peripheral”; he posted it to alt.romance, soc.couples, alt.support.loneliness, and alt.support.shyness. It read, in part:

“How could I not print part of ‘Song’ in this chapter,” I thought, and wrote Lee Chen for permission. Back came a letter from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary in Canada. People on the Internet love to end messages with “signatures” telling how they see the cosmos, and Lee had picked a quote that looked as gentle and logical as his poem. The speaker was the President of the United States in the movie Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love the Bomb. And the words went, “You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room.”

Sometimes I thought that in the battle of the sexes, certain areas of the Internet could be that war room. No man could claim to be a superhunk or millionaire without risking a female retort in the vein of, “Yeah, sure.” The Net was rich with put-downs worthy of an old Tracy-Hepburn movie. Clearly the men had started this war, however. “When a female shows up,” said the author of an explanatory file on alt.sex.wanted, “clueless folks tend to e-mail ‘wanna fuck’ messages no matter what she has said. This means many of them don’t post, only listen.” Fights had also broken out between the gays and certain heterosexuals, who came up with the witless fag jokes, and who, in turn, had drawn equally stupid remarks about “breeders.” In this sexual war, the biggest losers were SMHGs. That was Netspeak for Straight Male Horny Geeks, who, as noted earlier, suffered from the laws of supply and (lack of) demand.

Lee Chen was an SMHG in a nice way. His style had been to try in alt.personals rather than one of the tackier areas. When Lee had placed a recent ad, he had described himself as “a romantic dreamer,” and he wanted “a single woman between the ages of nineteen and thirty-three who is sincere, intelligent, attractive,” and “passionate” as well. Lee was twenty-six and entitled to feel his age. Moreover, based on his self-description, women would have no more reason to run away from him than they did from Greg Smith in his lonely days.

“I’m five feet eleven inches, 185 pounds, have dark brown eyes and short black hair,” Lee said. “And I’m a healthy, disease-free nonsmoker and considered attractive looking.” He told me he held a master’s in computer science, was continuing his studies, and obviously was destined to earn a comfortable living at the very least. Lee enjoyed “going out to movies and romantic dinners, discussing current events and politics, visiting museums and natural parks, walking along the rivers, listening to various kinds of music, giving and receiving pleasures with a sensuous partner.” So far, however, Lee lacked a woman—he was new in town. Maybe a minor part of his problem, at least among females off campus, was the kind of place that Calgary was. He saw it as “a cowboy city, big in the oil business, very similar to Dallas culturally, except for the cold winter climate.” This particular SMHG might have felt more comfortable in a more intellectually minded city such as Boston or San Francisco. But he was no snob and still held out hope of meeting one of the locals rather than confining the search to university people (“I’m sure there are many wonderful women in this town”). Simultaneously he decided to try the Net.

The first time out with a personal ad, Lee heard from a woman in, yes, Australia—E-Mail Central. Dozens of love letters threatened to melt down any fiber-optics on the Net; in fact, she sent Lee her erotic poetry and encouraged him to reply with the same. Through it all, he was high minded. “I believe in the mutual respect between women and men,” he said, “but am also saddened by the gradual decline of romantic chivalry in our society. I feel they don’t need to be mutually exclusive.” His poet in Australia seemed to feel the same. Within a month she promised to fly to Canada.

“My darkest knight, my love,” she called him. She was “burning with a need to talk with you, to share with you my fears, my joys. I ache to be able to brush a falling raindrop from your cheek and hold your handsome face close to my heart. I miss you already though we have not met.”

This woman could have been crafting bodice-rippers for Harlequin Books. “I thrive on every word that falls from your sensuous lips,” she wrote Lee. “I feel I am being too bold for a lady of my breeding, but what I feel has gone from my control before I was aware of my feelings.” More letters followed, more fire, more steam. And then, out of nowhere: “This is the very last time I will write to you. You have to leave me alone. Any future mail you send me will remain unanswered. We do not know each other. Words across a net aren’t a firm basis of a relationship and it takes time to form a friendship. We have neither and I cannot currently give either to you. I have strong personal commitments at the moment that leave me unable to commit to anyone, especially a man in a romantic way. Please understand. It may have been special and beautiful, but it has to be over. One day I may be in a position to explain further, but currently I cannot. I apologise once more and wish you well in your life.”

“Maybe,” Lee looked back, “it was just a game for her.” And, no dummy, he had learned from such experiences. Nowadays Lee was wary of anonymous addresses with low numbers that suggested their owners had been cruising alt.personal for a long time.

He had also learned of the usefulness of friendship as a prelude to love. “Of all those ladies who answered my original personal,” he said, “only one is still corresponding as a friend.” Another female friend was also in his life online, somebody he met in an unrelated newsgroup. She typed out an popular opinion and he wrote in to agree, and they found they shared interests. But neither saw romance immediately ahead. Nor was that true of the other friendships he had online. Although vague about them, he suggested that he was still on the periphery.

Reached some months later, Lee told me he had gone on to befriend “quite a few nice women around this campus.” In person and on the Net, however, he had yet to meet just the right one for those river walks, museum tours, and “giving and receiving pleasure.”

“Well, sorry, David,” Lee said, “but I didn’t have a happy ending. I‘m sureI‘m sure there are some people who actually find their true loves this way. Although I didn’t find true love, I’ve found many sincere friendships via the Net. So I’m glad that the Net has worked for me.” I was, too, and I wished him all kinds of wonderful surprises ahead. Chivalrous SMHGs like Lee Chen should be more than peripherals.