cyberlovers 2

(this article is one of a series about online dating correspondences in which the couple never meet, despite conspicuous outlays of time or emotion)

I responded to a forgotten online ad by F, and when she wrote back i was quickly taken by her assertive energy and bright intelligence. Adorably, her name rhymed with the African country she had been born in. The picture she sent pressed almost every visual button i had...she stood alone under a palm tree next to a volleyball court, her dark skin and hair the picture of natural beauty, her physique a complement of my own. She was looking for more than a hook-up, but she was all about freedom and multiple lovers. Although we shared some wonderful letters for a week or so, she decided that i was too monogamously-oriented to risk pursuing. The fact that i both agreed and disagreed was moot.
A month later, we resumed our letters. She opened up her life to me. She had been raised in Germany, and shared the most beautiful tale of sexual awakening with the German girl she had lived with. She had known many lovers. She was a painter, and her paintings were beautiful and moving. She told me about the two great loves of her life, a Brooklyn artist and a French businessman. The artist had been her first, and he had promised her she would never find another love as physically satisfying. She and he were still occasional lovers, and she was on friendly terms with his live-in mate. The businessman and she had been involved for a year or two, whenever he came to town. She explored submission with him, and related tales of degradation that were quite stunning (one of them either made him a freak of nature, or on viagra). I myself had never indulged in dominance/submission, but a part of me was so taken with her spirit that i closed no doors. When i told her about my taoist training, and separating orgasm from ejaculation, she was unhappy. Ejaculation was such a huge part of her enjoyment of sex, that this was almost a deal-breaker for her. I eventually told her that if i loved someone, i would never fully deny something so precious to them. For all her libertine ways, she had never had multi-partner sex. She told me there was something psychologically fearful about it. A lifelong devotee of fear-facing, i fantasized about making love to her with other men. There was something intoxicating about the kind of lover she wanted in me. She liked to devote entire days to making love (her "fourteen hours", she called it). During the months we wrote, the specificity and intensity of the fantasies i had about her were profound...the things i would do for her which i had never done, and the things she would do for me...
She told me all about her childhood, and sent pictures of her African home, where her family still lived, and with whom she was close. She told me about the ways her home life had damaged her spirit. Abandonment issues. She continued to send pictures of herself, and a couple of them literally took my breath away. She occasionally wore makeup and heels, but i felt that this wouldn't bother me like it would with other women.
She shared poems she had written, and one of them was among the most beautiful, heart-rending things i've ever read, and ultimately the straw that broke our back. It was a poem that ripped past all her surface strength, and revealed, in a tiny voice, her profound fear of never being loved. All along i had been dancing around the idea of being with her without having access to ALL of her...but when i read her poem, i knew that i needed to love her, without walls, beyond time. Even though i held on to the idea of meeting her (i suggested we could hold each other from time to time, in simple asexual love), she was ultimately too afraid of the self she had revealed to me. She wrote that in another time i might be the fulfillment of her most sacred dreams, but that she couldn't reconcile me with her present world. She asked me to walk away. I knew that to do that, i would have to wipe out every physical connection...delete every poem, trash every picture, take her e-mail address out of my computer...else i would never be able to let go.
I did all this.
A couple of times in the years since, i've had a moment of weakness in which i've sent a tiny e-mail to the address time won't let me forget.