Post & Tele Museum - Købmagergade 37 - Postboks 2053 - DK-1012 København K
Tlf.: (+45) 33 41 09 00 - e-mail: museum@ptt-museum.dk - www.ptt-museum.dk

(Museumsposten 2003-3)
Love Online


By Marie Ørstedholm

The internet has proved to contain brand new and fantastic possibilities of meeting people and establishing relationships. A password gives access to a virtual world full of living people of flesh and blood, and thousands of them have logged on with the same hope and at the same game: To find the one they have been looking for all their life.


The Net as a Meeting Point
As a meeting point the internet is infinite and offers the individual the possibility of targeting his search for a partner rather precisely at persons with similar interests and values as himself. To many people the chances of finding the one and only seem much bigger on the net than in the real world and many even express relief that they do not have to enter the “meat market” where looks are often decisive for the immediate attraction between two people. The love market of the net offers other possibilities.

Logging into a chat-room can be compared with going to a reception or a discotheque; you can move around quite anonymously and practise non-committal flirting right and left. You get in contact with a lot of different people, you can choose to “mingle”, i.e. chat with several people at the same time or with one picked person. Often you can follow several conversations that are taking place simultaneously.

The chat is lightening fast: You receive response to your words immediately, and the communication is often considered by the parties as an ordinary conversation. As in any other casual talk between people it is not subject to the same meticulousness with regard to wording and grammar as a correspondence by letter or e-mail. The words express what one thinks and feels – in that very second. The written language of the chat is – like that of the SMS – often very close to spoken language.

As it is all the time possible to follow other people’s conversations in the chat-room, there are also limits to the intimacy between two persons. Two people who wish to talk privately without being read by others may enter a closed chat-room in which they continue the conversation and exchange e-mail addresses and telephone numbers.

“Net dating” is intended for people in more serious search for a lover. You create a profile with indication of gender, age, interests, etc. Other users of the dating portal can contact the profile via e-mails, and in the same way you can see their profiles and write to them. Comparison with the personal ads in newspapers is obvious, and during the first years of the phenomenon searching a partner on the internet has indeed been regarded as a last resort for the desperate to find the partner that they apparently could not track down in “the right way” – in real life. Concurrently with the increase in the accession to the dating sites and the fact that more and more people meet examples of happy relationships established on the net among the people they mix with, the dating sites have eventually become widely accepted as a new and effective contact forum.

Denmark’s largest dating portal – www.dating.dk – was established in August 1998 and by June 2003 it had forwarded about 65 million love letters. Mid 2003 it hosted more than 500,000 profiles. At the dating sites communication takes place by ordinary e-mails between two persons. The designation “dating” is to be taken literally. The purpose for the users is primarily to make themselves attractive and thereby get in contact with persons with whom they might establish a real-life relationship. The first step is therefore to write an alluring profile that can create contact to potential lovers.

Prince Charming or a Budding Writer?
Cyberspace is in many ways a dream universe where hopes and longings are let out, and it can be difficult to bridle one's imagination when a correspondence develops promising. When two people are approaching each other on the net, words become the Alpha and Omega of the development of the relationship. If they do not speak the same language, the conversation ends quickly, but if they evoke some response in each other’s hearts, they may experience - through the language - a great extent of confidence and intimacy without ever having met in real life.

A cyber relationship may seem just as genuine as a real relationship, but is vulnerable as there is no guarantee that the other party is whoever he or she is pretending to be. “The worst thing about net dating is that you do not know for sure whether she is actually a he”, says a 31-year-old man. And you can to a high degree contribute to creating an illusion about the other person: “Having chatted with a bloke for a while you sort of make your own picture of him and then you fall in love. It is easy to fall in love with somebody you are only talking to because you create your own image of the person in your imagination”, a woman describes her experiences.

You may be badly disappointed. The number of stories about persons who at their first real encounter could confirm that they had found love is by far exceeded by the number of stories about the so-called “real-life downer” that hits you face to face with your interlocutor when you realise that reality is far from matching your fantasy images. Or that the chemistry you experienced on the net disappears once the other person has got a face and a body. It may be difficult to imagine offhand that e-mails and chat can replace the feeling of having a real love life in you hands; to study the swings of the handwriting and try to trace a scent of the loved one. Is there anything like finding a love letter in one’s letter box and carefully select the right moment to open it? The holy moment, in which a heartfelt love letter deserves to be read? We do not think so, we who grew up with them and still keep them in our drawers. But do the next generations agree?

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Post & Tele Museum - Købmagergade 37 - Postboks 2053 - DK-1012 København K - Tlf.: (+45) 33 41 09 00 - e-mail: museum@ptt-museum.dk - www.ptt-museum.dk