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I confess, I am a nerdgirl who loves her toys. So this is a column about technology, toys and relationships.
First, about the addictive stuff, which you non-tech obsessives call the bad habits. When I heard that Jennifer Aniston had broken up with John Mayer because he said he was too busy to see her—but he kept posting tweets online—I knew that Jennifer Aniston, if in some alternative, bizarro universe we were dating—would have dumped me, too. You see, my love of the way technology keeps me connected to the planet mostly likely matches—or outstrips—John Mayer’s. (Maybe we should date?)
If you are dating me, you ARE dating my devices.
For starters, there is my Blackberry. No one could keep his or her Blackberry closer than I do, not even if it turned into a helpless little pocketbook dog. My Blackberry is so omnipresent and my checking it so regular that my friends and lovers are known to say “Put that Blackberry away now!” at least a few times a week. Just like a Japanese teenager in a shopping mall, I believe that my little hand-held machine, slipped into a jacket pocket, connects me to the world and keeps me from being cruelly alone (and bored; I crave a high amount of information, brain is restless.)
Truth is, I don’t see the tweets, the texts and the email scanning I engage in almost as frequently as breathing as a rejection of my sweetie and my pals, I see them as my chance to take hits of an Interwebs oxygen that keeps my blood gases stable, a virtual relationship CRM that—much to my shock—can make my real life significant other and my pals feel a little slighted. (“Uh, sorry,” I mumble, as I slip it back into my pocket.)
And then, there is my computer. It’s not that my MacBook Pro—now covered with stickers and a little banged up from 12 months of travel—is any different than anyone else’s—it’s that this little machine is the gateway to my LIFE. Email, blogs, twitter, facebook, writing, poetry, photos, music—they’re all crammed inside this machine, my very own looking glass and two-way mirror to Wonderland.
My machine is so much the parallel data port to my brain—and the gateway to my activities, work and social network—that I think of it, not the places I am at, as home. This means that if you’re not one of those people who likes to sit, computer out, and noodle on your laptop as you talk, I might drive you crazy because I like to do that at least 20% of the time, especially if we’re just hanging out relaxing in a room other than the kitchen or the bedroom.
And then there’s my Twitter. OMG, do I love twitter. Now, I admit, I’m not as big a fan of twitter as my friend Robert Scoble, who posts more than 20 times a day, or my friend Amy Gahran, who tweets almost as often, but I still love me my twitter stream, both the reading and the writing parts.
Jennifer Anniston may have gotten pissed by John Mayer’s addiction to his tweets, but my sweetie A doesn’t feel that way; he’s more bemused by what I find so fascinating in this endless stream of 140 character posts. For A, twitter isn’t vital information about 940 people I kinda “know,” it’s a kind of noise equivalent to watching a dog watch TV-totally superfluous and mostly boring. And yet, he doesn’t go there with me, thank God.
(And I don’t indulge in twittering our private moments, or during dinner, or while he’s ironing my suit, like Ashton Kutcher did with Demi Moore, or….)
Of course, not all devices are destructive to relationships. Some help them, or make them a whole lot more fun (smile).
When I told the BlogHer contributing editors I was writing this piece, they sent me links to stories of people who met and fell in love online (on twitter!), like Emily Chang and Max Kisler and Gwen Bell and Joel Longtine, or links to where women they know were getting it on discussing their sex toys and vibrators, like the Mommy blogging community Room 704, or the Momservations discussion featuring, uh, handcuffs.
In both of these use cases, if you will, tech is making things better—bringing couples together
