Once a year the New York Times’ Modern Love column runs a contest for college students to submit their essays about love, intimacy and relationships. For the past several years the winning submissions have had something to do with “hook up culture.” Students trying to find intimacy where there generally is not or trying to defend the fact that they’re not looking for it.

This year’s featured essay took a turn into territory we’re all bumping up against – purposefully or otherwise.

Caitlin Dewey – a Syracuse senior – wrote about her experience developing a relationship with someone over Skype. Her essay titled “Even in Real Life, There Were Screens Between Us” tells the story of what happened when an online romance blossomed between she and a boy she met at an Internet conference. Dewey writes:

“With my Skype screen open and my webcam on, I viscerally felt that Will was sitting a foot away on my bed. Ignoring the times the picture froze or his voice cut out, I thought he looked and sounded exactly as he had in person. Sometimes, when he leaned into the computer to read an article I had sent him, I could see the pores of his face.
We started video chatting for hours every night — he from an ascetic all-white bedroom, me from the cupcake-print corner of my studio apartment. I learned that he ate take-out for every meal, slept in a series of identical white V-neck T-shirts and smirked with one side of his mouth when I said something clever. I knew his preferred coding languages, his least favorite content management system, and his general hatred of dancing, small talk and girls in bars.
One night, when we talked too late, I fell asleep with my laptop open and woke up seven hours later, tangled in cords. He was still there, asleep in the light from an open window, pale and young and pixelated.
Eventually he stirred, blinked at the camera and said, “Hey, you.”
“Hey,” I said easily. “How did you sleep?”

Dewey eventually built up the courage to visit her Skype-based beau in his mid-sized city, three states away. The courage part was a factor because she feared what so many people fear when transitioning the relationship from online to IRL – a term that’s become popular among the digitally savvy set – that things would be different.

And as the title of her essay foretells, they were.
“But after we kissed and ate pizza and went back to his house, we struggled for things to talk about. In real life, Will stared off at nothing while I talked. In real life, he had no questions about the drive or my work or the stuff that waited for me when I went back to school.
He took me out for dinner and read his e-mail while we waited for our food. He apologized profusely, but still checked his Web site’s traffic stats while we sat in his living room.
He took me to a party at his friend’s house where they proceeded to argue for hours about Web design while I sat on a futon and stared at the ceiling, drunk and bored and terribly concerned that I looked thinner online. At points, he grabbed my hand and gave me small, apologetic smiles. It seemed like a strategy game: a constant dance of reaching for me and pulling back, of intimacy and distance, of real life and Internet make-believe.”

The first time I read this essay I thought – ugh, these are the problems with developing a relationship rooted in an unreal connection. You never truly know a person. You can’t learn each others’ habits. You can’t get a sense of what it would be like to be together IRL. Ugh, kids these days, I thought.
It was the same reaction my mom had when she heard about girls being violated by men they met on Match.com or an older colleague had upon hearing that a father who tucked his kids in using Facetime for iPhone while on work assignment across the country found they didn’t recognize him in person when he came home.
Ugh – they said – this technology is hurting us, not helping us! These online connections aren’t real!
What happened to Caitlin Dewey is unfortunate. What happened to Caitlin Dewey is definitely more common these days because of the sheer number of people now connecting romantically over all the means we have to connect. But what happened to Caitlin Dewey doesn’t mean those connections can never work or are never “real” or are more hurtful than they are helpful.
It is easy to say that Dewey wasted her time with this whole Skype relationship because the guy didn’t turn out to be as she imagined. She would have known that after two dates if they lived in the same town. Maybe yes, maybe no. Caitlin’s is one story about a situation that was disappointing. It doesn’t not stand to represent all online relationships just as one letter-writing romance between a soldier and a girl-back-home not netting post-war marital bliss would.
I loved this essay because it was well-written, touching, and shed light on an issue facing this new generation of “daters.” But I fear it will cause too many people to react that way I reacted when I first read it versus the way we should when it comes to one story out of the millions happening every single day.
What I should have thought was, “Ugh, that’s unfortunate and sad for Caitlin Dewey, but it doesn’t mean all romances that begin online are doomed. It’s just that most romances that begin anywhere are doomed.”

*picture by Brian Rea from NYTimes