Online Fever

Over the last couple of years or so I feel like I've been trapped inside a Salvador Dali painting.

Surreal, beautiful yet oddly disturbing.

Perhaps I could describe it as a feeling of social schizophrenia: a perpetual manifestation of life imitating art in a rather dysfunctional way.

My analysis is reluctant because I don't have enough statistical data to make it very scientific. I do, however, have enough personal experience to qualify it as a useful collection of thoughts materialised from sitting, and sometimes wallowing in the mud. To illustrate my disillusionment I can draw attention to a recent, yet brief conversation with a young man who found his way to my online musings.

Tea? Coffee? Me?

It was rather impressive to me that his route to my writing had actually involved effort on his part. I'd felt excited to finally encounter someone who actually took the time to read! My bar of expectations is already pretty low: My writings are usually short and sensual and good enough to muse over between two metro stations. They are by no means the long, dreary manifesto's which I usually consume myself.

He'd liked the piece about the French guy who'd sent me the dick pic. He wrote that the only problem with my story was that I'd not given him something in return !

I felt my heart sink at that point. That was it? That was his main takeaway from that article?

Yep!

Him and plenty of others before and in-between.

I've recently listened to a rather long interview on the disadvantages of the sexual revolution for women, and the empathic conclusion was: "it's not his fault". I think I can agree that it's not any particular person's fault that we've become obsessed with fast pleasure and the gratification of our own needs at the cost of social etiquette. The narcissist self is today akin to self love, building self confidence and beating down childhood demons. And yet! Loneliness is a constant and growing epidemic amongst young and old alike. Why?

Perhaps one reason may be that people aren't willing to compromise personal freedom for attachment (of any kind), and that they see these things as mutually exclusive in the first place?

It's all about comfort and convenience...not love.

I have an acquaintance (barely, one might say), who not so long ago approached me point blank with a request for sex. His condition (for providing me with a well toned body and a handsome face) was that I should not talk about myself at all. He didn't want to know me or anything about me. It would be "just sex". Rewind back to before the online and sexual revolution and his approach would most likely have resulted in a slap in the face.

I took the empathic approach though and attempted to understand why he didn't care at all whether I was alive or dead. We butted heads on definitions for a while. Going back and forth during the chats as to why this and why that. In the end it became apparent that he didn't want to fall in love. It had also become apparent that he'd been rejected a few times while playing "the friend card". 

Not my problem...I thought 🤔. Get thicker skin! 🤷🏼‍♀️

My thoughts, and those of some wiser men to whom I'd spoken to since then, are that there should never have been expectations in the first place. That finding a match for dating and making love, and perhaps staying in that relationship, is difficult by default and bound to many failures before success.

I'd also add (not to bash too much on the casual sex market) that sex devoid of emotion, is an illusion, almost as much for men as it is for women. 

And then there's the other extreme! Within the expanse of two weeks, what started off as a chat about a role in an upcoming dark comedy took a very bizarre twist. He'd proposed dinner to discuss the role, the script and to coach me towards the best possible performance. I was impressed by the impeccable planning and by his suave expressiveness. Not many men are that well spoken! He was an upcoming director who'd already featured in a television interview about his first, short film 📽️. 

What could go wrong?

Apparently, sanity! 🤡

I received obsessive "good morning's" and "good night's", questions about why I don't talk to him if I'm online...where I was going, who I was seeing. He needed absolute fidelity "for the role" but also MORE. We hadn't even met yet and he'd decided we were made for eachother. Reality didn't matter. Much like reality doesn't matter overall nowadays. You can be and have whatever you feel you are and deserve. It becomes a difficult boundary to see, where the truth ends and the lies begin.

Not the first and certainly not the last "artist" profile to propose marriage to an already married woman 👠

I've come to the conclusion that this online fever manifests both as cheap promiscuity (aka porn) and as infatuation of love. 

Nothing online is real...until it's in your face. And even then...🤔

And yet we're online all the time, everyday and make little to no effort to bond IRL. 

Too busy? Or just lousy planning?

Or...unless there's a definite return, we're not willing be close, to anyone?

One particularly seductive element of the online realm remains the ease of contact. On the one hand it bridges cross border distances between loved ones, while on the other hand limiting the human touch with "the girl or guy next door".

Apps for dating, apps for affairs, apps for spanking and apps for socialising. Every couple of months a new app comes along promising to deliver what all the others couldn't: a real connection. 

Heading towards this Christmas 🎄, I venture to suggest limiting the power of apps and maximising the power of self...kind of like "elf" but with an "s" 😁. 

It means: be authentic, be truthful, be caring...

Window shopping is for bags, boots and bangles...not people. 😉 

Oh...and Merry Christmas 🎁!