How love stories fall apart on Facebook walls

“I ain't no expert on love”

She hadn't met him, but she mourned his loss like a lover would. But he had made promises online, and they indulged in some lovemaking online. They were all trying to prove that love existed, and they were the chosen ones. Except they were only “active” online. I told them I wasn't an expert. I was also not the babysitter feminist. I was only amused with the convictions. I asked for more. As any writer would.

“Sexting, you know,” she said.

“Oh, does that work?”

“Perhaps,” she said.

They had been dedicating poems, and photos, and tangential messaging had continued for days. By the time, she was able to get her wits about her, he had already seduced her. Or so she said. Besides, a recommended tool is google. Always google the poems they said they wrote for you. Not everyone is into attribution. That is just a journalist's habit. The others don't think copying is a blasphemous act. So, yes, he sort of played the seduction game well with stolen poems.

“You must be kidding me?” I said.

“No, you know we had something there,” she insisted.

The origins of modern love started in Yahoo chatrooms many years ago when you typed away things, and it was when internet was first manifesting itself as a solution to deprivation, and repression. You could send your lover a million photos of you smiling, swimming, cooking, sleeping, and doing all kinds of mortal things. And yet make them look so supernatural. You could be the perfect lover everyone's been looking for. You could be the melancholic poet, or the sadness expert. The facts of your life can be edited, too. It can be customised, and made to cater to your screaming heart. You could be a million people, and never be you. The rules of game are not defined. You play by instinct, and study the profile, and craft responses that you predict can get you the attention. You could whisper in their online ears the passions that burn in your heart. Except the whispers would need to be typed. Of course, online love is easy. There's no real person. There are no disappointments. Your lover says the sweetest, and the most passionate things. You respond like you found the soulmate. Except, there could be several such affairs. And you can have a million chat windows open. It's all about opportunity. The greed increases. There's no end to it. Your narcissism is fed. You show the best angles. An online veteran can be invincible. Only online. It is a dangerous world we live in — the virtual world. Never give out everything. Works both ways.

For the threshold generation that I belong to where we grew up with those clumsy looking phones, and had to dial the exchange to make what they then called a trunk call, we are a bit old fashioned still. We are still a bit wary of online love. We'd rather send real flowers than emoticons. We are still debating the pros and the cons. We are still figuring out how love can be translated in words.

We got our first mobile phones when we were starting college, and the costs of using those were so prohibitive that you'd do what was then a popular way to express love, called the “missed call.” Now, this “missed call” was used for all kinds of communication. If you missed someone, you gave them a “missed call” and if you stalked someone, you'd still give them these calls. You saved your balance, and tried to balance things with “missed calls”.

I remembered how we painfully typed those texts because phones weren't so smart back then, and even when I came to America to study, I had a phone that looked like a hammer. Later, when I got a job with a newspaper in New York, I bought myself a Motorola flap phone. We mostly used the internet to research, and we lived real lives back then. Like we hung out with friends, and went to picnics, and didn't think we were losing our fingerprints because of excessive and obsessive usage of smartphones. We also weren't such exhibitionists then. We kept things real.

Those were hotmail days. I mean, we logged in, and checked out mail once in a day, and went out to do some real legwork. In 2005, Facebook was introduced in some universities, and Syracuse University happened to be one of them, and it used to be so basic at the time that it almost felt like an intra messaging service where a friend would leave a message asking if I managed a job, or another would wish us for Christmas, and say she would see me at the cafe, or the library later in the day, and if you checked it in time, you'd show up. Of course, we didn't post deep shit status messages then. We discussed existential crisis in person, and we cried, and laughed, and we didn't boast our reading lists. We also didn't have these million filters, and selfies. We posted real bad photos. I mean that is how we looked on most days. Real, and with real issues like zits, or dark circles, and other stuff. We didn't really have filters.

But then, we became split personalities. And we became online people. Like zombies, or vampires. We whitewashed our faces, and we became everything we wanted to be. Some of us forgot who we were. Some of us even started having sex online. And of course, it was all so easy to pretend. You could fake almost anything.

And we even started to feel it meant something. Something like “forever” romance. We started going out less, and we started having hundreds of friends who liked everything we did. Then, we became part of the Facebook economy of likes. It was all so perfect, and reciprocation was so natural. Except, we had turned into a bunch of delusional people who were constantly projecting things that would make us different, and yet we didn't know where we were headed. And then, came Instagram, and the hasgtags, and the ambiguity of posts that everyone believed was meant for them. We lost the discerning eye. These were just online playgrounds. We started to spend a lot of time just managing our online profiles. We started listening less, and typing more.

We also became very, very lonely people. In the virtual world, intimacy acquired new proportions. It wasn't limited. We forgot how to be loyal. We had too much access, and rejections meant nothing for we would move on to the next, or manage several at the same time. It was dangerous for the mind and the soul, and yet we indulged in it. It was better to be online than to face others because we became insecure. We were all living in the ghost town of world wide web. The wild, wild world of lonely people, and predators, and it was all so primitive.

It has been a decade of this alternative existence. I call it the matrix, and the rabbit hole goes deep. It would be an understatement if I just said all of this is addictive. I mean, we even drive cars online, crash them. And how can we forget growing vegetables, and livestock online. I know Mario must feel like a dinosaur, too ancient for the new ones.

The point I am trying to make is that we are failing at everything, and more than ever, we are falling apart. I remember how we used to dress up for getting pictures clicked in those days. It wasn't everyday, and these pictures were compiled in family albums, and preserved. For instance, my grandfather would have not more than 30 photos in his entire lifetime. And fast forward a few decades, and some of us change profile photos almost everyday. Pouting has become the thing. You didn't care if you looked like some strange species of fish, and it was all beginning to feel like dementia. You craved for more attention, and we all turned into Dorian Grays of the world. We were oozing vanity, and we were being ridiculous. But so was everyone else, and so we fit in. We were no longer the misplaced, or displaced people. We found our solace online.

So, here's the thing about love. It never happens online. Because you can disconnect, block, and deactivate. In real lives, we don't do push buttons. We aren't phantoms. Not yet.

So, there's the story of the girl. She was lonely, and was trying to get over one relationship that began online, and never really worked. Because you aren't dealing with a real person with real issues when you are online. You are dealing with a projection, and when you cross over to real, it is all disappointment. Just like that, and while she was trying to recover, and get over what she called the shame of the whole situation, she found other online lovers, or let's say predators who counselled her, and let her believe they weren't judging her, and she went down the rabbit hole. No, this isn't me. Not every story is about me.

So, the girl was carried away. Too much love, and she emptied her heart out, and felt there was a connection except there were too many connections, and when such is the case, there's usually the danger of a short circuit.

No, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love Facebook and am okay with Instagram. These are repositories at best. But I visit these worlds. I still live in a real world.

I asked someone to explain to me, and they said it was quite simple.

“You type things like 'I am there with you. What would you do?' and then it would go on to things like 'touch me here, and touch me there' and so on and so forth,” the woman said.

“And?” I asked.

“It is simple. It is called sexting,” she explained.

But what if the person smelled really bad, I asked.

"But you can't smell online. We haven't progressed so far. You could ask what perfume they are wearing, and maybe put it on yourself," she said.

The thing is we are forgetting the beauty of touch, and of drinking coffee together. Small things, but those that make up life.

And when you wake up with messages in inbox professing love, and loyalty, you must press delete, and go and get some real coffee to wake you up. Everyone looks angelic, or like a sex goddess online. In fact, browsing through an app, I found that you could make yourself look "cute, sexy, goth, parisian, etc" and trust me, at the end of all this editing that could slim your face, and enlarge your eyes, I looked nothing like myself. I had metamorphosed into some being where with a click, I had altered my skin, and my features. And it cost me nothing. Seduction is everyone's game now. There are a million filters you must pass through, and come out looking dazzling.

People were pouring out their lives online. They were depressed so they posted some dark status message, and if they were happily married, they'd post an album everyday advertising the value of togetherness that was heavily edited to earn them the “likes.”

I was guilty of similar crimes except most of the time, I was confused about my own state of being so some mornings, I'd post some existential shit, and by the afternoon, I felt like I had a full-blown borderline attack, and the quotes became dark, sombre, and full of dark foreboding. By evening, I felt inspired by party goers, and posted happy things. And then, on some days, I became political, and on others, depending on the trend, I also became the stereotypical feminist armed with quotes from “A room of one's own” and I don't have anything against any of this as I love goodreads.com, but none of these battles, including feminism, can be fought on Facebook. That's why we don't have any real revolutions anymore. They die too soon. We change our status routinely. We have given boredom a new realm. It is an operative force. We become too bored too soon.

We became impatient.

In any case, we were all becoming voyeurs. And we had all kinds of updates, and we took status updates too seriously, and too personally, and we looked for deeper meanings in context of us, but there was none. We have complicated love. Or maybe we are oversimplifying it.

It is such visual love, and such an edited version of it, too. Lonely people sitting in their windows was what once was the image of solitude, and melancholy. Now, it is lonely people sitting in front of the screen, and uttering promises of undying love, and even consummating it online.

We just don't make the effort anymore. We are happy with the shield of internet. We are being sucked into the zone of invisibility where we are content with not being there in person. Online love is politically correct. But there's something to holding hands, and not saying anything at all. And Skype is not a substitute. But then, we can substitute everything almost, but can't replace. A touch is a touch.

We are looking for instant gratification. And there are options. Nothing wrong with it, except online love can be lethal for the soul. The soul needs much more.

If love was so easy, we'd never have those fantastic tales of unrequited love. And we'd never identify with the poets who wrote about the pain, and liberation of unrequited love. Love is unequal.

But with online presence, we have become control freaks. We are careful about what we give, and receive. The selfie generation believes that a pout is a kiss, and it is what it is. Kissing the thin air in front. No kidding.

Love has become a compulsive disorder.

The thing is, those from the threshold generation, like me, are still trying to understand. As spectators, we watch. Nobody wants to come over anymore. They just want to kill time online.

And in the end, even heartaches are online, and everything else is. And heartbreaks come with the click of the mouse. And so do reactions. And you feel you are on crack when people shows signs online dementia, and that's what it is – a disorder. And selfies are good, but not every photo can be screaming for attention. There's something to abstract things. Abstract is mysterious. Mystery must be the trigger. Spilling out everything is only about you. And in the end, we have failed love. It exists, but we can't scour for it online, and even if we do, it needs to make that crossover. We need to see, and feel. And a touch could tell a million other things. Disappointments are part of life. The merger of online and real is a dangerous thing. In the end, we only fail ourselves. We live in an eternal age. We don't grow old. But we aren't embalmed bodies. And in the end, as an observer, I am only laughing at the imagined seriousness of such love. You get stories online. You don't live them. A writer is a dangerous being. We are prowling for stories everywhere.

“I don’ t want to learn anything from the failure of this love.” -Susan Sontag