Saturday, February 16, 2008

Perfectly Flawed

From a male POV:

At first it seemed doable to try to maintain a long distance relationship with someone, because we had the video skype, and the google talk, and the multimedia messaging service, and so many other ways to simulate being there. But, oh how quickly it faded. A good video feed can't ensure that sarcasm will be understood, you can't properly comfort someone without putting your arms around them, and let's not even talk about sex. A million columns written by Regina Lynn at wired won't make cybersex more appealing than the real thing.

To get to the point, I ever so recently attempted to maintain a relationship with someone I met in person but happen to live a couple thousand miles away from. She being from a city that I had so very recently moved from, but didn't meet until a business trip, post move. Just stupid cosmic happenstance. She and I shared one completely clothed evening together and then continued to talk after returning to our respective home towns. We "communicated" over a number of different types of data connections for months before seeing each other in person again. She came out to visit me, and we had a great time. She would later come to describe this brief flirtation with reality as "perfectly flawed." At least that's how I remember the quote going. I refuse to open the e-mail, even though it is archived in my gmail.

It was a very slow process for me to realize that it wouldn't work out. What can I say, sometimes boys are just dumb. When it came to an end after a number of awkward phone conversations she was upset. She expected that if it was the real thing that I would drop everything and come to her. I don't fault her for this at all, in my heart I want to be idealistic in that way, but my jaded skin occasionally stops me. There were just too many things that didn't fit right. Things that would have made our incompatibility very quickly obvious in closer proximity.

The upsetting part though, is the slow aftermath. Her calling attention to the fact that she had removed me as a friend from a social networking site. Haunting status messages under her IM name like "i wish that without me your heart would break." I didn't want to just assume that it was directed at me, but I took the possibility into consideration.

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