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.

Greg and Sue

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 ’50s[of 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.