Three Ways to Find Love on the Internet

This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for March 2024

I want to talk about something we all might have experienced. Love… and the Internet. To my habitual readers this is no surprise, after all, I love the Internet. But what I want to address in this post is the different ways in which love has found us through the Internet.

The first scenario is the obvious one, that is, matching with someone through a dating app. I have a friend whose current relationship started precisely like this. They matched on the Facebook clone of Tinder, they started talking, and they fell in love. I’m incredibly happy for my friend, but I also understand there are many people who would dislike this particular way of meeting someone. They would consider it either too easy or too artificial, a synthetic substitute for human interaction. Well, to them I ask, isn’t the Internet as a whole a substitute for “traditional” human interaction?

Matching with someone through dating apps couldn’t be simpler. You set up your profile with the required fields, type your hobbies and interests and upload some pictures in which you and your mother think you look pretty handsome. A couple of years back everyone with an opinion column used to think that this was the future we were approaching to whether we like it or not, that user profiling was going to become so good that the necessity to look for a special one would be a thing of the past, it would be served to us, algorithms would scan through million of profiles and pair us with the one we have the most in common. The year is 2024 and I can say that this is not the case. Profiling algorithms have gotten better but there’s some mystery element to romance that prevent humanity as a whole to embrace the dating app omniscience.

The second way of finding love through the Internet is via applications other than those specifically designed to do so. I have another friend who recently found love via Discord. I personally find this way to be more organic, to be closer to fall in love with a friend IRL than the previous one. This time, it is not algorithms the ones to decide who are you going to meet, but rather the natural process of meeting someone through common interests, hobbies or ideas. Any platform can serve this purpose. I previously used Discord as an example, but any app where two strangers can meet would work just fine: Telegram, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it. Yet another friend of mine found his current girlfriend after adding her as a friend in Facebook and sharing a funny meme to which she reacted. They’ve been together for over two years now.

The third way that one could find love on the Internet is the one that is the closest to me, because it is the one in which I once found love… or something like it. First, I would start by asking, like the song goes, what is love? I’ve once found funny the notion of people falling in love with fictitious characters but what I’m going to tell you is something similar: falling in love with an avatar. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking exclusively about profile pictures (although it might play a role) but about the general idea of the avatar as a manifestation of one’s identity, separated from the real person.

On the Internet we can show only what we want to be seen by others. Thus, it is possible for us to create alter-egos which we use to interact with specific communities. As such, one could easily adopt any given personality when using a website and use a totally different one when using another one. Even within the same website we can create as many profiles as we desire and have a specific personality assigned to each one of them. Some people would declare that this makes for an artificial persona, an entity different to the person that creates it. However, I would argue that in reality this persona is not entirely artificial, but rather a purification of some of the traits that defines one’s identity.

We live in an era in which concepts like the metaverse are starting to become commonplace, in which the idea of an avatar which can be traced back to your real identity is not as extravagant as it once was. Years back, the notion of an Internet avatar was that of adopting a brand new personality, distanced from that one of the real world. In Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, avatars in DeepArcher, the novel’s equivalent of the metaverse, a mixture of both LSD: Dream Emulator and VRChat, can work as a nexus to the afterlife. This works even if it is never clear whether the recently deceased whose avatars appear on the Internet are truly the ones behind the keyboard. Maybe they are just a prank, or a virtual recollection of memories designed to be active only once the real person is dead, or maybe even they are the real thing and you are truly talking to the ghosts of those persons. Truth is, avatars in real life work as those in the book. You can never truly tell apart lies from truth. You are always guessing if the person you are talking to is telling the truth about themselves or not. And even in the case in which the users conveys the most genuine information about themselves, the sheer usage of a specific platform unavoidably leads to show only a small portion of one’s true identity. As such, posting under an avatar is to pretend to be what that avatar represents. Even if we use a portrait as a profile picture, our real names as usernames and try to adhere to the same ethics we do in real life, sooner or later we will end up distancing ourselves from the avatars we have created. They would become their own thing, a thing that exists on the Internet and will keep existing long after we log out and, of course, long after we die.

I once met a girl on an anime forum. I liked her a lot and I like to think she liked me a little too. We chatted a lot through MSN Messenger, and even had a couple of video calls, back in the time when FaceTime wasn’t a thing. But I could never brush off the thought that there was something artificial about her, that all of our interactions were a facade under the avatar or persona she had created. We never met in real life and maybe that’s for the better, because I like to thing of her as an Internet inhabitant, someone who only exists within the confines of the Web protocols. Did I love her? I don’t think so. I definitely fell for her, which is a step in that direction, and I still have reminiscences of those times whenever someone tells me they have found love through the Internet. It makes me feel special, like “I did it before it was cool”.

Those are the ways in which some of us have found love through the Internet.