Sexual Disorientation: Phones r 4 Txt, People are for Sex

Delve into the jungle of the newly out and single. TNG Managing Editor Corey discusses dating and sex - or lack thereof - every Wednesday morning in Sexual Disorientation.

In a posh San Francisco hotel room two blocks from Union Square, I had just done something over the phone that Alexander Graham Bell couldn't possibly have had in mind. It happened with a fellow Georgetown student with whom I had started getting flirtatious by phone and chat while living on the other side of the country. We still had weeks before we'd see each other in person, so while I normally wouldn't have done it, I thought phone sex might be okay in this situation.

"So," I heard from the other side of phoneline, "how did you enjoy our first time?"

With that one sentence, I suddenly felt very strange about what we had done. Phone sex is not sex, and the implication that the two were the same - and we had just experienced our "first time" - freaked me out. What I didn't realize yet was that this was but one symptom of a problem that this guy and many others share in the so-called Digital Age.

Technology allows us to communicate in a depersonalized way. But what happens when we become more comfortable with even romantic relations through the medium of a computer or phone? What happens when we make intimacy unintimate?

It wasn't just this incident that made me wonder. We hooked up once when I moved back to the District, and although we both enjoyed it, I didn't think it was a good match and wanted to cut things off. He, on the other hand, wanted to give it another go.

But whenever he asked me to fool around again (or, for that matter, have a conversation), he wanted to do it via phone or webcam. At this point we were living ten minutes away by foot in Georgetown. "Wouldn't you rather come over in person?" I asked. It seemed utterly bizarre that someone would want to mess around using Skype when I could be there in ten minutes, especially since we had done so before and there were no complaints. Needless to say, I took that as a sign that I should abandon any notion of reviving this affair.

We've all heard warnings about the dangers of these kinds of communications. But in this case there was no risk that my "teenage college student" was really an old man living in backwoods Virginia in a house full of human hair. He was who he said he was, he just preferred to partake in even his most intimate encounters from a distance.

And while that's an extreme example, I think it's part of an all-too-common trend. How many folks seem to have nothing to say in person but will talk up a storm through chats and texts? Or will flirt and send all kinds of signals from the safety of their PDAs but hardly show any PDA when encountered in person?

Sometimes these electronically-only men have led to boring dates where they haven't had anything to say. Having determined that our chemistry wasn't real, we've parted ways and that's been that. More puzzling are the men who will go on one of these horrible dates, return to their laptops and phones, and request that we go out once again. They don't seem put off by the fact that we have no chemistry in person because the chemistry when we communicate electronically still seems to work.

Truth be told, the "information age" has brought out the worst dating qualities in more than just these dependent users. It's bad over-analyzers like me, too.

If you have a conversation with someone face-to-face, you have it and it's over. You retain certain memories - images and words and emotions - but you usually can't go back, retrace every word and ask all of your friends about it. I find that when I try to report back on a conversation to another friend, I realize in telling the story that most of the little details I've fussed over aren't very important.

On the other hand, when you can return to everything that was said it's easy to become obsessive. I know I'm not the only guilty one because I'm constantly asked by friends to interpret what someone meant between the lines, whether someone is interested in them, etc.

And on top of that, breakups in the land of emails, texts and IMs present the perfect opportunity to relive the past again and again. I've tried to wipe my Gmail account of long-lost men, but they still creep up when I search for something obscure or look back into the annals of emails past. Thanks to the good folks at Google, our flirtations and relationships can never really be erased - they just get archived.

All of this leads me to my conclusion: technological communication doesn't really make the dating thing any easier. It leaves a digital version of a paper trail, it allows people to escape finding real chemistry, and for some people it can even come to replace intimacy altogether.

Flirting and fooling around through an electronic medium may take away some of the pressure and awkwardness, but that's part of meeting people and dating. I love reading through the missed connections on Craigslist as much as the next girl, but if finding a partner was as easy as finding a used sofa, relationships wouldn't even be worth pursuing. I'm want a relationship so that I can turn the computer off and spend my time with another human being. It doesn't seem logical that I'll find that with someone who needs to have a keyboard between us.

So I'm going to try my best to pursue relationships the good old-fashioned way - in real life, or IRL for you instant messagers out there. My phone bill is high enough as it is, and I'd rather spend the evening watching old episodes of "Friends" than some guy stripping on a webcam.