"Can you hear us?" I ask my friend Sugar who's on the other end of the line, as I place the phone--on speaker--between myself and our friend Parker.

"Loud and clear," she responds. We hear some splashing as she shifts in the tub. I imagine her reaching for a glass of wine and taking a long sip.

It'd be a great ad placement for Verizon: two perfectly coiffed figures, basking in the warm Honolulu sunset, sucking on fresh coffee as a third friend lounges in bath bubbles across the Pacific in snow-bound Seattle.

You know, if my carrier were Verizon. It's not, but it doesn't matter. Technology is an amazing thing.

"So after a week of nursing him back to health, he disappears," Sugar tells us. She's talking about her boyfriend, Anteyus, whom she's been seeing for a couple of months.

Sugar isn't one to give herself up to anyone--sex is one thing, but Anteyus didn't want to be one of those "disposable guys"; he'd pursued her passionately to get her to commit. Then, he'd become violently ill and Sugar had spent days caring for him.

"I owe you the world," he told her as she, usually a total temptress, stood over his washing machine uncharacteristically laundering his vomit-stained sheets.

That was then. Just days later, she couldn't get him to take any of her calls or even answer a text. When he finally did phone, he asked whether she wanted to come over for some sex.

"Just like that," she tells us, clearly irritated. "Never mind that this whole city is in a complete standstill because of the snow. I take care of your sad ass all week long and now you can't be bothered to call and when you do, you want me to brave the elements to see you? Forget you."

It was too late anyway--Sugar was already busy texting back and forth with an ex-fling.

It reminded me of a conversation I'd overheard while waiting in line for the restroom at Uncle Bo's recently.

Girl 1: I hate how I get when I don't hear from him. I become a crazy person. I can't think about anything else at all, just stare at my phone like an idiot.

Girl 2: That's what you get for putting all your eggs in one basket. You should never focus on any one person.

I relay this exchange to Sugar and Parker and Sugar laughs.

"That's right," she says. "Line them up so when one fails, there's always another one to fall back on."

"Aren't you afraid that will cheapen the experience?" Parker asks.

"No. No. What cheapens The Experience is sitting at home on a Saturday night drinking Kahlua and Bailey's Irish Cream alone, waiting for your phone to ring."

A mathematician friend of mine once put it this way, "If one is skillful with the creation of their life, his goal is to experience as many points as possible. Specifically, nothing should be engineered as a single thing but as an N-dimensional set, where N approaches infinity."

I wouldn't go as far as infinity—after all, we are somewhat bound to a pesky dimension called time--but I can't say I disagree with Sugar entirely, either.

 

It’s later and I'm grabbing coffee with Sarah at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Waikiki. I met Sarah in college a couple of years ago. She came to Hawaii and never left, and though she's always talking about moving to Los Angeles, I'm beginning to doubt that she ever will.

"I go by the rule of threes," she tells me, without looking up from her Blackberry, which she's thumbing furiously. "Always have three objects of interest in hand in the event one or two of them flake--which they will."

"Doesn't that cheapen the experience?" I parrot Parker.

I interviewed a woman recently for a book about love I’m helping put together. She and her partner are polyamorous and looking to expand their relationship into a trio. I asked whether she thought it was possible to love and be committed to more than one person.

"You can," she told me. "You can love as many people as you like. The only real thing that prevents you from having sustainable relationships with everyone is time. Time is a scarce resource."

"Cheapen the experience?" Sarah asks me, setting her phone down and taking a sip of her green tea. "Not at all. It enriches it by making you less hysterical. You're not waiting around losing your mind. If they call, they call. You give them their space to figure out where you fit into their lives. Meanwhile, you're having steamy text-sex with someone else."

"Is that what you’re doing?"

She smiles and picks up her phone again. A few clicks later, I'm holding it, looking over a back-and-forth of delicious filth.

"I met him while he was here on business," Sarah tells me about her Object #2. "We've been having text-sex for weeks. He's insane. I adore him."

Her laptop emits the familiar bump of a Gtalk IM. Sarah looks over, then laughs.

"Is that Object #1?" I ask.

"No, Object #3. I sent him some pictures this morning. He loves it," she types something back to him and looks up. "Object #1 is decidedly unavailable, even though he's right there on my contact list, green as Available gets."

She's referring to Gtalk’s status system, where available contacts show up as green dots, as opposed to red for Busy and yellow for Away.

I marvel at technology again, just as Sarah's Blackberry vibrates and she takes it from me. Still, I can't help but wonder if all this advancement hasn't made us all a little ADD.

Are we so used to the instant speed of instant message and microblogging platforms like Twitter that we are no longer able to wait a couple of days--or even minutes--for a call? Is technology really a blessing, or is it diluting the potency of a relationship? In an ambient aware world where we can stalk our objects of interest’s every move--where they are on BrightKite, what they’re reading on Delicious, what they’re listening to on LastFM--are we building stronger relationships or are we shortchanging ourselves?

How much is too much? How many is too many? Whatever happened to The One?

"Don't you just want to take the time to really, truly get to know somebody?" I ask Sarah. "All their details--like real life things beyond what they're eating or what movies they like?"

"Real life things like their neuroses and financial issues?" she responds with a smirk. "Not in the least. I want romance, desire, delight. Give me fantasy or give me death."

"What about connection? What about being known so well that someone can call you on your shit and give you the kind of talk that really changes your life?"

"That's what friends are for," she says without looking up—she's typing into her Blackberry again.

 

BLOGGIE TREATS

I think part of the reason I always prefered to hole myself up online when I was dating was how depressing the bar scene made me. Jessie revisits the horror in a recent post at 20-Nothings:

The minute our bucket arrives some old-ish banker man throws us a 30 second party. “WHOA! Look. At. This. Look what we have here! These girls ordered Natty Light. Natty LIGHT. These. Are. Women. Would you look over here!” It was embarassing and yet amazing. People looked. We smiled. Boom. Bar fame.

That's enough to get me to stay home until the end of the season.

 

The crashing economy is not doing anyone any favors, whether we're starting to date or maintaining a long-term connection. What they say is true: most divorces and break-ups are the result of bad finances.

But fret not, in a piece at Nerve, Caitlin MacRae goes through all the reasons the recession is actually going to rock our love lives.

"When everyone works till seven, happy hour doesn’t really get going until eight," MacRae says. "With more free time, you can look forward to those midday drink specials and the afternoon bouts of poor judgment they produce."

 

Men are always talking about how much they want to get their hands on a real vamp, but can they handle it? In a piece for Black Heart Magazine, Sugar Kane explores the phenomenon we've come to call The Marilyn Complex:

The average young brute on the street would scoff at anyone questioning his ability to please a Marilyn. “Baby, I could satisfy you all night long! You have no idea how I work it, baby girl! Woo! Damn, what I would love to do with those sexy thighs and ass. I would have you screaming, girl!”

And even if a man doesn’t say it, he thinks it. Because most men expect a Jackie O and are bewildered when the bedroom door opens for the millionth time that night and Marilyn says, “I want more.”

You want more, too. Go get it.

 

Contributing editor AV Flox is a freelance writer who splits her time between California and Arizona. She and her husband have no children or pets, only properties and neuroses. She writes about web culture on OMG. OMG! OMFG!