Is cyber love possible?
PsychologyOnline.
I was very sceptical at first. Cyber psychology? No way, I thought! I warmed to the idea, however, and recommended that the institution involved make their investment.
What changed my mind were discoveries I made in research at the time. One finding I made that caused me to turn the corner was the fact that people were frequently (but not always) inclined to be more open and honest when engaging in anonymous dialogue with their computer screen than they were in a face-to-face encounter with a therapist. This was a salient and important fact in treating some conditions like alcoholism and addictions. “How many drinks have you had today?” asks the therapist. “Oh just the one, doctor,” says the client swaying in his seat breathing fumes that would slay a dragon.
I was reflecting earlier about the nature and type of relationships one makes on the internet. I’ve made some very interesting friendships here, some of which I have confidence, faith and trust in. I even have a couple of friendships that have extended into other dimensions like voice communication, but that’s all for now. I’m sure I will meet one or two of the people I talk to here one day. I’ve been struck by the honesty of most of the people I speak to here on my blog.
I believe that certain forms of cyber attachment are possible. Cyber infatuation is commonplace. So what of cyber love? Is that possible?
Before I attempt to answer that question I’m going to go off on one of those doodling excursions that I’m inclined to do from time to time. Unlike some areas I write about here I don’t profess any real depth of expertise in this subject, so the doodling will take the form of an exploration of ideas.
I’m not wholly convinced that people are more inclined to be honest, or expose their true self (whatever that is) when talking to a computer screen. People in cyberspace say and do things they would not do face-to-face. They lose their inhibitions. This is called the “disinhibition” effect.
Disinhibition can cause people to be more trusting, intimate, share secrets and personal truths far more quickly and readily than they might do in face-to-face encounters in their daily lives. They can also make spontaneous acts of generosity and kindness.
In our consideration of love, therefore, we might say that cyberspace is an accelerant of intimacy.
But disinhibition can run two ways, people can be harsh, critical, rude, aggressive, blaming, angry or even hateful and threatening as easily as they can be trusting and intimate on the net.
I’m something of a cyber-veteran. I’ve had access to the internet since its creation although this is my first personal web-site. In that time, I’ve observed a number of behaviours some of which I can explain in psychoanalytic language and some I can’t.
Cyber relationships can be high on transference. The nature of cyberspace means that in social encounters we can exercise fantasy and our imagination in a way we couldn’t in-person. We can ascribe all sorts of qualities to another that we would wish or hope to exist in a friend or loved one. Transference, however, is about the transfer of a normally powerful emotion from someone in one’s past onto another in the present. It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or to children. For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend or former lover.
Transference, like disinhibition, can be positive or negative.
That’s all conventional stuff.
Also I believe that we all carry some sort of image inside us of the idealised woman or the idealised man to whom we might be attracted.
The sources of this contra-sexual image are complex. They may come from infancy, childhood, our cultures, art and literature, media and the church…from everywhere in fact. Some of these images are archetypal, they’re embedded deep in our culture (and they might differ between cultures). I feel there is no doubt that experiences in infancy and childhood have a differentially powerful influence in how we construct these images. I also believe they are, to some extent, subconscious or perhaps, unconscious. They are what we might experience as the mysteries of interpersonal attraction.
As an aside, I do believe that children who suffer abuse might internalise idealised images of the perpetrators of abuse at an early age that later in life causes them to select abusive partners.
This, in itself, is an interesting subject for me and one about which I’ll write further, but having suffered emotional child abuse I’ve been more than curious to determine what effect infantile and childhood attachments have had on my adult relationships. I subjected myself to a whole battery of psychological tests to determine the extent of their effect. I’m delighted to say that I’ve moved on to an amazing degree, and that my test results indicate a low degree of correspondence between childhood attachments and adult relationships now, although this has not always been the case. I’ve made some very big mistakes in the choice of intimate partners in the past. I’m still learning my lessons.
Coming back to cyberspace relationships, I believe that it offers great scope for something that I’ll call projective idealisation. When we cannot see, hear, touch or smell the object of our attention, we can ascribe whatever qualities we like to them. They can become the man or woman of our dreams. Our computer screen is like a blank canvas on which we can project whatever qualities we seek and desire of another at will.
There is another aspect of cyberspace interaction that I’ve observed and I believe it can be intuitive, conscious or manipulative. I’ll call it “mirroring” here. Idealisation in love generally involves taking the best qualities of ourselves and projecting them on another. Mirroring involves the rapid absorption or assimilation of another’s personality then playing it back to them as one’s own. The mirror plays back a reflection of another’s feelings, interests and values. It can feel seductive and attractive. We might say, “This person and me are so alike,” or “How well this person understands me!” Frequently, it’s the cyber-tactic of the internet Lothario or Casanova. I doubt somehow if it’s a practice that one could get away with so easily in-person. For me, body language, gestures, inflection in speech and eye contact would give the other person away.
No doubt, cyberspace has pushed our social frontiers and changed our working habits, but I don’t feel yet it offers a sensory alternative to love, nor do I believe it will ever. I believe that cyberspace has opened all sorts of wonderful possibilities as a place for making friends and, possibly, even finding lovers, but in order to experience true intimacy with another, one sooner or later has to meet.
If we consider how we bond and interact in human relationships then the limitations of cyber relationships become evident. There’s sight, sound, touch, smell and taste (Yum! Get a grip, Geoffrey!)
None of these are easily possible in the cyber world, although the defenders of internet relationships might point to communication using webcams and the internet’s to transmit and receive voice messages.
These still lack the three-dimensional qualities of human interaction. Audio and video streaming are getting better but they lack all the subtle qualities including those of body language of in-person meetings.
Something that brings this home to me is my life in France. I speak some French but it’s not that fluent nor is it good enough to engage in more complex social relationships. Most of those I know here speak English too or else we manage to communicate more deeply by speaking in Franglish, a clumsy combination of our two languages that often makes me laugh. I find that the French speak very fast too. Often they say I do the same in English. I have sat in the middle of a crowded café surrounded by French people gabbling at enormous speed where I have been unable to understand a word being spoken. Nevertheless, I have understood much of what has been going on between people by their gestures, expressions, intonation and body language. My good French accent will sometimes get me into trouble too. People will talk fast at me and I struggle to understand the odd words. Frequently though I can fill in the gaps of what’s being spoken by their facial expression and tone of voice. The complexity of human communication has so much richness and subtleties beyond language, our main means of communication in cyberspace.
Touch, I believe is a very important human need, and one that we as adults in our often reclusive technological living worlds do not give sufficient attention. Infants deprived of touch can get depressed, ill and die without touch and physical comfort. How adults interact physically with their children becomes a cornerstone in their wellbeing and their development as fully-formed human beings. Being deprived of touch and tactile sensations as an adult can cause insecurity and anxiety. Don’t whatever you do, underestimate the power of touch. A hug, a kiss or simply a pat on the back or a handshake can do so much for another. So get kissing, hugging and touching now! (There I go again!)
Smell and taste are two very powerful, primal and even primitive ways we connect intimately with others. It is through touch, smell and taste that the infant bonds with its mother. They are the stuff of loving intimacy too: The sweet smell of hair, the touch of skin against one’s cheek, the scent of another’s body. Smell and taste draw us very close to another; they stir up strong emotions. They are essential and fundamental in loving intimacy.
So what else happens in potential cyber love relationships? I believe that because of the disinhibition effect that it is possible to attain a level of intimacy and trust very quickly. My question is therefore, then what? How does intimacy grow from there? I do not believe that love can grow from typed words alone.
The danger that lies in the speed of intimacy attainment is that disenchantment can set in equally quickly when intimacy has nowhere to go. You can’t go for a walk, share a meal, or hold another close in cyberspace. I believe that often unless a real life interaction takes place at some time then anxiety and disappointment will come to fill the space in which intimacy once existed. You can take steps and make moves along the way, exchanging photographs, speaking on the phone can help you on your way, but if love is the outcome you are seeking then sooner or later you will have to meet in-person.
Acknowledgements to John Suler PhD, Professor of Psychology at Rider University for his work on "The Psychology of Cyberspace"
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Making Love Relationships Part 1
But I had some underlying concerns about what really happens when we do loving relationships. I was very happy with my feelings about real or true love being unconditional giving, I still am. I have some concerns about it still, although these are more about the world in which we live rather than those feelings themselves.
I was not really sure how to start talking about loving relationships, about the vocabulary to use so I've synthesised and combined bits from here, there and everywhere to give the words a broader and better fit to my own feelings, thoughts and beliefs.
I have drawn on a lot of material that can be demonstrated to be generalisable by and large, although there are many exceptions, but there are some patterns too that are helpful to understand.
One word of warning, if you are expecting a cookbook of "how to" ideas, better to buy a recipe book then read this as I don't believe that such books work.
I believe that there may be a set of characteristics, of “love components”, that are common to most relationships.
I'll talk about those here as well as some of the phases of early development stages in love relationships and the events that might be expected to take place within them.
I want to break away from most of what has been written before in that I want to allow for unending growth possibilities in love. Most empiricists and other psychologists would simply ascribe a sort of structural determinism that seeks to impose a form of limiting rationality on what is, in my view, entirely subjective, intuitive and unbounded in its reality and possibilities.
To join things up with other aspects of our social world about which I have written before I am moving to a world where I see intuition, emotions, feelings, consciousness and unconsciousness as being those phenomena that influence our worlds of love relationships rather than some pseudo-scientific rationality that might be imposed on it by experts.
This is very much a work-in-progress. In part, it draws on published material by Robert Sternberg (et al), at least for its outline framework. I do have a sense that Sternberg may be moving away from being the hero of empiricists to someone who might take a similar position to me. I do not know. I sense that where we might differ is that he still tends to see love as stories that might inhabit our unconscious minds which he and experts like him might interpret (A latent determinist who acknowledges that love is ultimately a subjective construct) whereas I believe that the only way to achieve an enduring love is to move to a place where love is synonymous with greater consciousness, accessible intuition, personal responsibility and freedom.
In his book "Love is a story" (OUP 1998), Sternberg breaks away from the traditionalists. He acknowledges that love functions at the intuitive rather than rational levels and that our experience plays a part in how we love too. He recognises that psychotherapists have failed to understand the underlying realities of our relationships. Psychotherapists have tended to focus mainly on the manifestation of difficulties (symptoms) in relationships, rather than the underlying reality of our relationships that may give rise to those difficulties.
The problem that I have with Sternberg's work thereafter is that he attempts to break down love into a set of narrative systems containing a series of presuppositions that people bring to relationships of which they are (largely) unconscious. After this he sets out his expert analysis of twenty-five different types of narrative with his view on their interpretation and their capability of adaptation.
I am not totally sure about how unconscious these stories are or for that matter, whether his work is a novel thought that has been enlarged to the proportions of a theory. I do agree with his thoughts about subjectivity and intuition, however, and that is a very important leap forward.
It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our hearts and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our hearts without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should just write a story, just a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks just a story; a story that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We might be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!
The components of loving relationships
These are the conventional groupings of love components originally identified by Robert Sternberg:
Erotic Passion – This is the stuff of physical attraction. It's the racing heartbeat, sexual desire, erotic excitation and a physiological activation that feels just great! It's like being on drugs. The best sort of drugs as masses of endorphins course around our bodies and make us feel high!
Romantic Passion - This is a dimension that differs between cultures but for us it is a process of what I might call positive idealised projection. Here we take the very best parts of ourselves, often of the idealised contrasexual image that we all hold inside us and project them on to the other person. We see perfection in the other; we see not who they really are, but who we hope they will be. We seek out the good traits of the other. We find what we feel we need in what we see and feel of them.
It's here we do our romantic identification of ourselves with romantic ideals (cultural myths), of our belief that there is something magical in our relationship, our belief in the omnipotence of love as something that will inexorably produce happiness.
Intimacy - Intimacy is truly wonderful. (See, I'm a love enthusiast really!) This is the place of our special bond in an affective love union: It's where affective support, understanding, communication, trust, self-revelations, security, comfort and ease with one's partner lives.
My next “component” is where I see the possibility of deep and lasting love residing (or not, as it's simply a conscious choice and may be thought too difficult by many):
Companionate Consummate Giving Love – In part, this is the place of the unconditional love that I wrote about in the "love and sex" blog. There I focused on one dimension only (Unconditional giving love) to distinguish love from sex. Here I would like to expand our possibilities of love to include all four dimensions of deep friendship, its passionate components (including the expression and satisfaction of sexual desire), unconditional giving love, intimacy, as well as the possibility of making our commitment to maintain this love.
This almost looks like a place of emotional utopia to me, but who would not wish for it? Perhaps by understanding our stories and allowing their past pain and despair to heal, of exposing our consciousness, and knowing what it is for which we strive, we might write this new love story for ourselves. I believe this is a conscious choice. There is nothing intrinsic, mystical, innate or god-given here; it's simply a choice. But don't get me wrong, it is not easy!
Love is not necessarily something that happens exclusively inside of us as individuals. It is that too, but our ideas about love come from our belief systems, our religions, our cultural myths and social norms, from politicians, corporations, from the media, from literature and from Hollywood. In fact, our notions about love come from all those beliefs and ideas that uphold our social world. They come from what I have collectively called our consciousness. It is consciousness that embraces and informs all of our ideas about love and that lives both within us and outside us too.
In a television interview after his engagement to Princess Diana was announced, Prince Charles was asked if the couple was in love. Diana responded for him quickly and enthusiastically. "Of course," she said with a warm smile. Charles added, under his breath, "Whatever 'in love' means". Charles's uncertainty is not that surprising since love means many different things to different people. Ultimately love is whatever we choose it to be. We do have that freedom. But make no mistake, it takes real courage to stand up for the love we want, for the love that is most satisfying, healthy and enduring, since it may mean flying in the face of all that our culture holds to be valuable.
Otherwise there are no given truths about love, no deeper meaning that is accessible only to psychologists or anyone else. There is biology. There are the biological drives to mate, reproduce and parent but what I am looking for here is an emotional state that might promote our health and wellbeing that includes our loved ones and our families; A healthy loving positive environment is also conducive to the development and growth of secure, confident people.
My own interest is in exploring and discovering the emotions and behaviours that might produce the healthiest, enduring and most satisfying ways of being. There is no deep truth to uncover; our truth is what we make it. We have freedom of choice and the ability to take responsibility for ourselves (albeit that many find that difficult), to determine our own lives in ways that they may serve us and others around us best.
Of course, I should add that I would not consider all forms of love to be necessarily healthy and I have not addressed the question here of "why love anyway?" I will look at that question and unhealthy forms of love in a later blog. I will also look at ideas about "needing" love, and attachment theory where our experiences of infancy are seen as shaping our adult romantic lives and much more besides.
Originally I had written about companionate agape love, but agape was problematic to me. Agape has been cited by many others to correspond with altruistic, sacrificial love and I felt uncomfortable about it as it smacked of the "sack-cloth and ashes" denial of the sort often associated with Christian fundamentalism. I do not find the ideas espoused by that sort of Christian to be either that loving or attractive, so I have decided to distance myself from it and revisit agape later.
Going back to the piece on love and sex, here is what I wrote about real / true love there:
"Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one's own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice.
As I wrote in "the myth of falling in love" it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it's a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It's the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults."
That was part of the story, but I do wish to allow for the expression and satisfaction of sexual desire, of growing our affectionate bonds of understanding and intimacy and building deep friendship here too. My main aim of the love and sex piece was to show that love and sex are different and to talk about how we might build a solid emotional foundation where real love might develop.
All relationships need some aspect of friendship to survive, although some unhealthy relationships may exhibit marginal friendship only (or none at all). But this is a new place of deep friendship and deep possibilities for me, for the most wondrous possibilities.
Sternberg talks about "commitment" being a phase of a relationship. I want to stay away from phases that prescribe determined courses of relationships in all but one and that is the first phase, the romantic phase. I'll re-define commitment as an event or activity that takes place somewhere past the end of the romantic phase but I am not going to set out anything beyond that.
The romantic phase: This might be called the fireworks phase! It's a really wonderful phase. There's a massive growth in Erotic Passion, which according to empiricists, plateaus at the end of this phase although it usually continues for a number of years at the plateau level then diminishes. Its continuance at a level that is satisfying to the people in a relationship may continue if the relationship is to survive the longer term.
Also Romantic Passion soars up like a rocket. Everything is good, positive even euphoric during this phase. We see a lot of perfection around that is often just a romantic illusion.
One should not pour scorn upon this phase, it is a wonderful, exciting (and for some, an addictive) experience and I believe that it helps us build up the endurance for the life challenges that follow, and they always do.
There are many variant or deviant endings (the sexual conquest, romance addiction or serial repetition are examples.) that can occur either within or after this phase. Nothing here is cast in stone.
Interestingly enough and based on massive empirical evidence, the typical duration of the romantic phase is about six months.
I believe we might make another inference here though: Where there has been strong development of Intimacy, the relationship may move towards commitment, but the point of outward commitment is certainly not always at six months or thereabouts, but some commitment, even if it is just purely an emotional commitment, is needed to carry the relationship forward at the point where the romantic phase ends.
Two events will normally occur after the romantic phase although it is very possible that they may happen during this phase in some part, but not completely.
The first event is relationship "testing". This is the part where the partners ask, "Is this person really the one for me?" "Do we want the same things of our lives?" "Will being with this person be someone that I can endure and who contributes to the life I want, as well as my everyday life now?" "Could I really live with this person?" "Do we understand each other well enough to make a commitment?" "Can I tolerate this person's impulsive / overly measured behaviour?" "Can I trust this person with the knowledge of my true situation?" "Will this person support me in my goals and desires for my life?"
Testing generally happens after the romantic phase has ended. It's the bump back down to reality. It's here that we start to see the person as the human being they really are. Our bubble of euphoric bliss bursts and gets deflated. In the normal course of relationship development, it's the first event to be a make-or-break point and it's one of the most important decision points in a relationship.
One thing I would say though is that studies show that Romantic Passion continues to grow through this phase and beyond for some years so testing is not inconsistent with maintaining our romantic ideals in the relationship.
The next event is about "commitment".
Commitment is a real place of struggle. It's often talked about as the "power struggle phase" or the "growth phase". I prefer the latter term but there is a real power struggle here too.
It's where partners negotiate the balance of power within a relationship, the style of that power whether it's democratic, consensual or autocratic.
It has to happen so better do it consciously rather than fight!
It's also here that personal boundaries are set down and negotiated as well as our need for personal space and all our other emotional and personal needs. Forget the marriage contract, as it is here where the emotional agreement will be reached that will form the basis of any companionate or conjugal bond.
The commitment process need not be hostile. For example, one might decide to adopt a gentler consensual decision-making style but inevitably there will be some tension as each partner sets out his or her needs and wants. Personally I don't enjoy hostility, antagonisms and antipathy and I'm sure that there are constructive ways of agreeing personal needs in the form of making and discussing personal requests of each other without trampling on each other's feelings. Ultimately each partner will need to feel comfortable with the agreement, if an agreement is to be reached and growth or security in love is to follow. Where power plays or games strategies are adopted to gain biased benefit for one partner or the other, resentment may follow close thereafter.
One last and very powerful thought: there is no doubt that the passions of romance and eroticism may diminish over time, but it is my belief that they should be enjoyed to the full for as long as they endure (and as long as possible!) A loving sexuality is very healthy. In fact, I believe it is a prerequisite of developing and maintaining emotional and mental health. It is not, however, a substitute for love. There is something more that may reward all our pain, struggles, hurt and the apparent transience of these passions. I believe that deep friendship, intimate and unconditional giving love, has an amazing power to grow and develop indefinitely and infinitely during our lifetimes. For me, that is what makes love worthwhile. I know of nothing else in life that is more desirable, worthwhile or beautiful.