Running this gaming community I host puts me in touch with a lot of different people; a trend recently has been “dating within the community”. Now, I’m all for finding love online, I found my husband online, but he lived fairly close to me and it was feasible to spend time actually “together”. I find unreasonable online relationships to be pointless, not just pointless, but kind of silly in my opinion. Online relationships aren’t “real” relationships and never leave the “honeymoon phase”, I feel that this too isn’t healthy, a real relationship needs to be able to endure passed this so called “honeymoon phase” to mature into something long lasting and strong. For an online relationship, once the honeymoon phase is over, so is the relationship, because that was all that was binding it together, the lust, the desire, the googly eyes… but a real relationship is so much more. I feel bad for these women and girls within my community, given to unrealistic fantasies of what love is or can be, don’t they know that they deserve better, that they could HAVE better… the answer is obviously no. It is indeed this technological world that has connected us in such a way that love has become impersonal, we are more comfortable connecting digitally than humanly, neighbors don’t say hello anymore, breakups happen through text messaging, and entire relationships are conducted via the web.

It makes me sad to live in a world where people can’t look you in the eye anymore, rather than having an adult discussion, they communicate through impersonal text where they can be as hateful as they want to be without taking responsibility for their words or actions in person, because that is what they are comfortable with now. For example, my step daughter refuses to speak to her father in person, let alone on the phone, she would rather lash out in text to avoid an adult conversation and the emotions and reality that may come with it. She is like most youth of today, hiding behind a keyboard, completely inept and uncomfortable with healthy human interaction. So why do we choose to stunt ourselves in such a way, because it’s easy? I feel this is a false sense of ease, putting us in a far more difficult and volatile emotional circumstances, stunting our development as human beings, as social beings, narrowing our horizons, and our dreams.

I don’t see children playing outside anymore, playing in the mud, climbing trees… this digital age. What have we become? What morals can we teach our children when they are so focused on a world that doesn’t even really exist, relationships that don’t really exist, feelings founded, not in reality, but fantasy? I wish I could feel the world the way I did when I was a child, before the internet, before cell phones, the air just seemed to smell sweeter, the world looked brighter, and so did the future, but this was not the future that I expected, although I saw it coming. I want nothing more than for my children to experience this life first hand, in all of its pain and ugliness, and in all of its happiness and beauty. This life is an adventure and it is meant to be explored, but here we sit in front of our monitors, while those more daring don’t simply exist, but live, tangibly and with a passion.