Intimacy on the Internet: The Dilemmas, Limits, and Opportunities for Intimacy
Paul H. Elovitz, The Psychohistory Forum and Ramapo College
Intimacy with another human being is one of the peak experiences of life. It is a wonderful feeling ofcloseness, which one can have with a spouse, lover, child, parent, brother, sister, friend, teammate,schoolmate, comrade in arms, co-editor, or colleague. The closeness can be physical, as between lovers, orintellectual as between psychohistorians developing a new paradigm. In this article I explore aspects ofintimacy and how the experiences of intimacy are affected by online communication.
Intimacy is a continuing process involving closeness and distance, rather than a fixed state or location. It is agoal to strive for in one's life. For over a quarter century, my wife Geri and I have experienced various stagesof intimacy amidst daily life, loving, fighting, raising our children, burying many loved ones, and exploringthe world and our own inner selves together. I can think of no greater feeling of intimacy than when, afterlovemaking, my wife rests her head on my arm and shoulder while our thoughts drift into sleep. We arecompletely free of tension. As she falls asleep, I feel not only like her lover, but also like a parent with atotally relaxed, newborn child. My thoughts or hers drift away and the boundaryless sense of closeness passes.
Though my greatest feelings of intimacy are with my wife, it was another woman who inspired this article onintimacy. Evelyn Sommers is a psychotherapist in Toronto, Canada who answered my call for papers on thepsychology of online communication with the suggestion that she write a paper on the ebb and flow ofintimacy on the Internet. I thought it a wonderful idea, but Evelyn dashed my hopes when she e-mailed thatshe would only write if she were paid for her efforts. I took offense at what appeared to be a devaluing ofscholarly writing, and e-mailed back to that effect. Evelyn responded that while she had the highest respectfor scholarship, as part of a shift of focus in her life, she wished to make writing a professional, paidendeavor. We sparred for a bit as each of us strove to be understood, but it soon became apparent that werespected each other's values as we created a dialogue on intimacy. Our disagreement led to friendship whichI doubt would have happened had Evelyn simply agreed to write the article she originally proposed. As wechatted online, I liked her response ("I can always use another friend") to my suggestion that we correspondas friends.
Disagreement as a step towards friendship is something that has fascinated me ever since I discovered theunconscious. Disagreement/fight-ing/conflict can be a powerful, unconscious step toward connection as inmy exchange with Evelyn. When I feel the impulse to be critical of another, I try to remember to ask myself"why expend so much energy?" Unconsciously, what do I really want from the other person that leads me todisagree so strongly? I developed this impulse in my own training psychoanalysis and after years ofwatching patients denounce and disclaim things that they ultimately embraced and incorporated into theirlives for the better. So our disagreement has actually led to a continuing friendship online.
The 1998 film, You've Got Mail! dealt with the vagaries of intimacy established over the Internet. Meg Ryanmeets Tom Hanks online, and a romance blossoms because both find their real-life romantic relationship tobe predictable and tedious. Then fantasy meets reality. Meg Ryan discovers that Tom Hanks is an owner ofthe chain bookstore that is putting her neighborhood children's bookstore out of business. Its closing does notkeep the two friends, turned adversaries, from ultimately getting together by the end of the film. The film highlights the limited sense of the other person online and the hazards of information that is given out of context. It also underscores the role of projections in relationships. What if the other person is ugly and youexpected them to be beautiful or handsome? What if they had a disagreeable smell or reminded you of adisagreeable ex-spouse? What if one has projected his/her own values onto the words of the other? The happy ending in the movie does not occur as readily either online or offline. Evelyn Sommers reports to meabout the power of projection online of many of her patients and friends as well as of the highly addictivequality of online communication.
Intimacy normally ebbs and flows in all relationships. The closer we feel to another human being, the morewe may have to come to grips with our own frightening complexity and disclaimed impulses. Intimacybetween the sexes is hard to establish and maintain both on and offline. Online communication offers some advantages. People have more time and space to work out potential problems in the relationship without thepressures that come from immediate contact. At a distance, sexuality is not as likely to be an issue as it is inface-to-face relationships between the opposite sexes. A comfort level and a degree of trust can bedeveloped before difficult subjects such as money and sex have to be dealt with as they must in closerelations. There is less pressure, and the relative safety this provides leaves more room for friendship to grow.
My use of the term "close relations" above, however, is a reminder that we are used to making friendships upclose on a face to face basis and my sense is that at a distance we are much less likely to really know theother person. The online friendship may be based on false premises: What if you just hate the way the otherperson looks when you meet them in person or if they have presented an unrealistic, idealized version ofthemselves, or you have put your best foot forward by failing to mention some idiosyncrasy? Risk and safetyare vital to all relationships. If we care, we risk being disappointed, betrayed and hurt. If we choose only a"safe" relationship with somebody with whom we can not be too close, then our level of intimacy is alwaysgoing to be limited. In therapy, the rule of abstinence (limiting psychotherapist/patient contact to talking fortherapeutic purposes) can be very frustrating to the patient. But it also protects the patient from the myriad ofcomplications -- not just sexual ones--which would stand in the way of the special type of closeness betweenanalyst and analysant. Anonymity is an important part of the protection that a patient has and a therapist willnot normally acknowledge even the existence of any therapeutic relationship with the client unless the latterrequests it as in the case of dealing with third party insurers.
E-mail connections often have the anonymous quality that one associates with meeting a stranger on a trainor plane. Since it is not expected that there will be any subsequent relationship, people often feel freer to saythings that they would not risk divulging to their close friends or family members for fear of theconsequences within that or other relationships. The irony is that when one feels so close to the strangerbecause of the ease of communication, the tendency is to want to continue the relationship that developed sowarmly because of the anonymity. Most friendships based on this type of anonymity do not survive attemptsto continue them in person. Online there is a better chance for continuity because of the safety-in-anonymityand distance.
Safety is a fundamental requirement for intimacy both online and offline and can be created in many ways.Psychohistory Forum meetings are designed to avert the types of criticism and fighting that so often plagueinterdisciplinary fields such as psychohistory where the tendency is to pay homage to one's primary discipline or favorite theorist by criticizing all others. Montague Ullman developed a wonderful techniquefor dream appreciation in groups based upon a high level of protection being offered to the dreamer who thusis much freer to probe the unconscious even among strangers meeting for the first time (Montague Ullmanand Nan Zimmerman, Working with Dreams, 1979). Psychoanalysis provides considerable safety to theanalysant so there is the freedom to free associate.
Though the media loves to capitalize on the lack of safety on the Internet by carrying accounts of womenwho are raped by men they met over the Internet or boys who are lured into homosexuality (or even murder)on the Net, the central fact of the relative sexual safety of Internet friendships should not be ignored. Thissummer there have been gender wars on the Psychohistory Mailing List discussion group. I suspect thesemostly dead-end discussions have as much to do with anxiety over the impending establishment of a newpsychohistory discussion group as they have to do with relations between the sexes. (Mailing lists seem toprovide a safe outlet for the expression of anxiety and in so doing sometimes fosters a sense of intimacyamong the participants.)
At times however, gender and intimacy may come into real conflict. Clearly, to some people intimacy means sex. Though this is not the type of intimacy I am writing about, sexual feelings certainly are present inrelationships. Few things are more appealing than the closeness of lovers who share most things. This is verymuch the opposite of those who are simply looking for anonymous sex. Every morning my AOL account hasoffers of pornographic type sexuality that have nothing to do with intimacy but much to do with titillationand voyeurism. In ordinary relations, mild sexual feelings can take the form of a pleasant type offlirtatiousness. But, if they are too intense they can become a problem. I note that online I am much quickerto form friendships with women than I am in person where there is more room for misunderstanding aboutintentions. In this sense, the Internet heightens my abilities to have friendships with the opposite sex.Sexuality can be a problem in parent-child relations: I think of a girl who had a wonderful relationship withher father until she reached the age of sexual maturity. She was then rejected by a parent who was frightenedby the very idea that he had some sexual feelings regarding his daughter.
Age too can enhance or diminish intimacy. Growing old together can mean that a couple, of whatevergender combination, can learn to anticipate each other's every need. The vision of young people is oftenclouded by the thrill of newness, idealized versions of other people, counterdependency needs, sexual urges,and inexperience. The other day I heard myself say to the new clerk in the cleaners, "what is your name?The letters on your necklace are too small for my eyes to read?" She responded, "Ellen, and I have troubleseeing things too as I get older." My response was, "My eyes don't see as well with age, but my vision ismuch better than when I was young." In short, I was feeling that the perspective of increased experience thatenhances with age, offers a better view than youthful eyes can often provide. On the Internet I feel frustrated when I do not know if I am communicating with a 20-year-old or an 80-year-old. My desire to have a senseof the age of the respondent is based partly on my inclination to relate differently with people on the basis oftheir ages. When I have a good sense of the temperament, values, views, and age of a respondent, I find thatI am much more relaxed than when I do not. For example, when I learned that Evelyn was close to my age, I felt closer to her than before.
Fear of loss is the enemy of intimacy. If we are too fearful we will not establish closeness. Some peoplerespond to the fear by becoming highly dependent and needy; others by saying, "who needs this personanyway." I think of a several times divorced woman, capable of enormous intimacy, whose automaticresponse to some problems with her fiancˇ, was to declare "go find someone else!" She sought to avoid therepetition of her trauma of abandonment by driving away her lover. In counseling, the couple had to developways of overcoming her strong impulse and his hurt reactions. On the Internet when the online "honeymoonperiod" is over, the question becomes just how will the relationship be nurtured. Online, friendships do needto be cared for especially since proximity cannot enable the parties to facilitate the relationship by readingbody language and listening for slight intonations of the voice. Inaction is all that it takes to kill an online friendship. If one person doesn't write for a while this may prompt fears of rejection and end the onlinefriendship.
Time and care are essential for intimacy on and offline. My wife and I had to struggle to make enough timeto nurture our intimacy. Even in my online relationship with Evelyn Sommers this issue came up as shekidded me about my cutting short my messages so that I could go water my plants to keep them from dyingin the drought. As previously stated, the big problem with Internet friendships is that you do not really knowif the other person is presenting an idealized version of themselves, based upon how they think they ought tobe, or if they are allowing the full range of their personality to show. I doubt if we can ever know. Secrecy is the enemy of close relations. It is what allows the "false self" to dominate and thus allow the friendship to bebuilt on a crumbling foundation. A relationship based upon false premises can, like a romantic novel, havelots of actions, but little intimate feeling. Openness and honesty, in person and on the Internet, remain themost solid base for friendship. On the Internet the challenge is greater or at least different because it isharder to check the reality.
In conclusion, intimacy is an ideal for which we strive on and offline. Though it is best in person, there aresome positive aspects to online intimacy which I recommend. When I first began to think about this issuemy sense was that there was a much more limited space for Internet closeness than in fact I found it to be,and I recommend it as a nice adjunct to in-person friendships. My new friendship with Evelyn illustrates thispoint, as well as the role of disagreement as a step towards friendship. The ebb and flow of closeness may beinteresting to observe and participate within -- it has certainly been for me.
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