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"'No man is an island,' the poet John Donne said. But we're becoming islands," my mother told my friend Parker and me on a lazy afternoon lounging on Waikiki Beach.
"As we search for people in our respective niche, we cut off others," she went on. "The internet has made it so easy to find people like us that we no longer know how to deal with anyone who isn't like us."
In real life, you can't block someone who's right in front of you. You can't always select who you work with the way you select who you choose to interact with. You can't opt out of someone screaming at you from across the table. And you can't really sleep on insults being hurled at you the way you might sleep on a nasty e-mail.
"If you can't equip yourself to deal with those situations—aren't you slowly isolating yourself?" my mother asked.
Parker and I, die-hard lovers of the web, could say nothing.
Of course, with the sun setting in the background and a cool breeze blowing through the palm fronds, being an island didn't seem like such a bad thing.
Even so, I couldn't shake a conversation I'd had a couple of days before, with a college friend of mine who lives in Honolulu.
"I don't want to get to know my lovers," Sarah had told me, taking a long sip of her green tea. "Reality is the natural enemy of desire."
Was she right? Have we become so used to relationships online with other people's personas, so stripped of the mundane stuff of life, that we've become intolerant to such details?
"In the beginning, lovers always binge on profiles and blogs," Sarah told me. "But that doesn't mean anything. Our Facebook profile lists only what we want to show. If you're a die-hard fan of The Hills and don't want anyone to know, you can keep it to yourself and no one will know until they move in with you and catch you some night, binging on all the episodes you had to TiVo."
I laughed.
"It enables total fantasy," she said, scanning her laptop screen before turning it around. "Look: you're a fan of FailWhale, Dubai and something else I can't even pronounce. Does it say anything about how OCD you are about keeping your kitchen spotless, how much you hate social functions, how hard you grind your teeth in your sleep when you're stressed? Of course not—ooh, and Citizen Kane is one of your favorite movies? Bitch, please."
"I do like Citizen Kane!"
"Quote a single line from the movie," she dared me.
"Rosebud."
She rolled her eyes, smiling. "Anyway, like I said, it doesn't mean anything. Even if a love affair starts with a lover binging on our profiles and blogs, it doesn't last. No one reads anything after the initial stages unless something goes wrong. The thing is: no one really wants that much information. We say we do and we might think we do, but we don't."
Is she right? I think the only man in my life who reads my blog anymore is my father. And it's entirely possible that he does this partly to make sure I'm not writing about him.
Savvier web users set up Google Alerts for their names and call it a day.
My friend Parker has a horror story. Several weeks ago, he met a man online who completely captivated him. Smith is a talented opera singer living in Manhattan; he's handsome, older, and supposedly wiser.
Every morning, Parker would wake up to a series of delectable text messages. He and Smith became fans of the same things on Facebook and left each other suggestive notes on their walls. If ever Parker phoned him when Smith was busy and couldn't talk, Smith would answer the phone to let Parker know what was happening around him. He'd also send Parker photos and video footage of all the places he'd go on a given day, from the Met to Central Park.
So despite being in Honolulu at the moment, Parker could still enjoy all the things he loved about New York. It had all the makings of a dreamy love affair.
And then one morning, the inevitable happened. Smith bore his soul: not in the well-crafted wonder of over-share-y blogs, either. Smith exposed himself in the vague and moody glory of our physical existence. That is, the sort of whining that refuses to give a reason or cause, leaving the person with whom one is interacting to serve as little more than an emotional punching bag.
"Immediately after, he
