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.”