Intimacy on the Internet: The Dilemmas, Limits, and Opportunities for Intimacy Online and Offline

Intimacy with another human being is one of the peak experiences of life. It is a wonderful feeling of closeness, which one can have with a spouse, lover, child, parent, brother, sister, friend, teammate, schoolmate, comrade in arms, co-editor, or colleague. The closeness can be physical, as between lovers, or intellectual as between psychohistorians developing a new paradigm. In this article I explore aspects of intimacy and how the experiences of intimacy are effected by online communication.

Intimacy is a continuing process involving closeness and distance rather than a fixed state or location. It is a goal to strive for in one’s life. For over a quarter century, my wife Geri and I have experienced various stages of intimacy amidst daily life, loving, fighting, raising our children, burying many loved ones, and exploring the world and our own inner selves together. I can think of no greater feeling of intimacy than when, after lovemaking, my wife rests her head on my arm and

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shoulder while our thoughts drift into sleep. We are completely free of tension. As she falls asleep, I feel not only like her lover, but also like a parent with a totally relaxed, newborn child. My thoughts or hers drift away and the boundaryless sense of closeness passes.

Though my greatest feelings of intimacy are with my wife, it was another woman who inspired this article on intimacy. Evelyn Sommers is a psychotherapist in Toronto, Canada who answered my call for papers on the psychology of online communication with the suggestion that she write a paper on the ebb and flow of intimacy on the Internet. I thought it a wonderful idea, but Evelyn dashed my hopes when she e-mailed that she would only write if she were paid for her efforts. I took offense at what appeared to be a devaluing of scholarly writing, and e-mailed back to that effect. Evelyn responded that while she had the highest respect for scholarship, as part of a shift of focus in her life she wished to make writing a professional, paid endeavor. We sparred for a bit as each of us strove to be understood, but it soon became apparent that we respected each other’s values as we created a dialogue on intimacy. Our disagreement led to friendship which I doubt would have happened had Evelyn simply agreed to write the article she originally proposed. As we chatted online, I liked her response (“I can always use another friend”) to my suggestion that we correspond as friends.

Disagreement as a step towards friendship is something that has fascinated me ever since I discovered the unconscious. Disagreement/fight-ing/conflict can be a powerful, unconscious step toward connection as in my exchange with Evelyn. When I feel the impulse to be critical of another, I try to remember to ask myself “why expend so much energy?” Unconsciously, what do I really want from the other person that leads me to disagree so strongly? I developed this impulse in my own training psychoanalysis and after years of watching patients denounce and disclaim things that they ultimately embraced and incorporated into their lives for the better. So our disagreement has actually led to a continuing friendship online.

The 1998 film, You’ve Got Mail! dealt with the vagaries of intimacy established over the Internet. Meg Ryan meets Tom Hanks online, and a romance blossoms because both find their real-life romantic relationship to be predictable and tedious. Then fantasy meets reality. Meg Ryan discovers that Tom Hanks is an owner of the chain bookstore that is putting her neighborhood children’s bookstore out of business. Its closing does not keep the two friends, turned adversaries, from ultimately getting together by the end of the film. The film highlights the limited sense of the other person online and the hazards of information that is given out of context. It also underscores the role of projections in relationships. What if the other person is ugly and you expected them to be beautiful or handsome? What if they had a disagreeable smell or reminded you of a disagreeable ex-spouse? What if one has projected his/her own values onto the words of the other? The happy ending in the movie does not occur as readily either online or offline. Evelyn Sommers reports to me about the power of projection online of many of her patients and friends as well as of the highly addictive quality of online communication.

Intimacy normally ebbs and flows in all relationships. The closer we feel to another human being, the more we may have to come to grips with our own frightening complexity and disclaimed impulses. Intimacy between the sexes is hard to establish and maintain both on and offline. Online communication offers some advantages. People have more time and space to work out potential problems in the relationship without the pressures that come from immediate contact. At a distance, sexuality is not as likely to be an issue as it is in face-to-face relationships between the opposite sexes. A comfort level and a degree of trust can be developed before difficult subjects such as money and sex have to be dealt with as they must in close relations. There is less pressure, and the relative safety this provides leaves more room for friendship to grow.

My use of the term “close relations” above, however, is a reminder that we are used to making friendships up close on a face to face basis and my sense is that at a distance we are much less likely to really know the other person. The online friendship may be based on false premises: What if you just hate the way the other person looks when you meet them in person or if they have presented an unrealistic, idealized version of themselves, or you have put your best foot forward by failing to mention some idiosyncrasy? Risk and safety are vital to all relationships. If we care, we risk being disappointed, betrayed and hurt. If we choose only a “safe” relationship with somebody with whom we can not be too close, then our level of intimacy is always going to be limited. In therapy, the rule

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of abstinence (limiting psychotherapist/patient contact to talking for therapeutic purposes) can be very frustrating to the patient. But it also protects the patient from the myriad of complications—not just sexual ones—which would stand in the way of the special type of closeness between analyst and analysant. Anonymity is an important part of the protection that a patient has and a therapist will not normally acknowledge even the existence of any therapeutic relationship with the client unless the latter requests it as in the case of dealing with third party insurers.

E-mail connections often have the anonymous quality that one associates with meeting a stranger on a train or plane. Since it is not expected that there will be any subsequent relationship, people often feel freer to say things that they would not risk divulging to their close friends or family members for fear of the consequences within that or other relationships. The irony is that when one feels so close to the stranger because of the ease of communication, the tendency is to want to continue the relationship that developed so warmly because of the anonymity. Most friendships based on this type of anonymity do not survive attempts to continue them in person. Online there is a better chance for continuity because of the safety-in-anonymity and distance.

Safety is a fundamental requirement for intimacy both online and offline and can be created in many ways. Psychohistory Forum meetings are designed to avert the types of criticism and fighting that so often plague interdisciplinary fields such as psychohistory where the tendency is to pay homage to one’s primary discipline or favorite theorist by criticizing all others. Montague Ullman developed a wonderful technique for dream appreciation in groups based upon a high level of protection being offered to the dreamer who thus is much freer to probe the unconscious even among strangers meeting for the first time (Montague Ullman and Nan Zimmerman, Working with Dreams, 1979). Psychoanalysis provides considerable safety to the analysant so there is the freedom to free associate.

Though the media loves to capitalize on the lack of safety on the Internet by carrying accounts of women who are raped by men they met over the Internet or boys who are lured into homosexuality (or even murder) on the Net, the central fact of the relative sexual safety of Internet friendships should not be ignored. This summer there have been gender wars on the Psychohistory Mailing List discussion group. I suspect these mostly dead-end discussions have as much to do with anxiety over the impending establishment of a new psychohistory discussion group as they have to do with relations between the sexes. (Mailing lists seem to provide a safe outlet for the expression of anxiety and in so doing sometimes fosters a sense of intimacy among the participants.)

At times however, gender and intimacy may come into real conflict. Clearly, to some people intimacy means sex. Though this is not the type of intimacy I am writing about, sexual feelings certainly are present in relationships. Few things are more appealing than the closeness of lovers who share most things. This is very much the opposite of those who are simply looking for anonymous sex. Every morning my AOL account has offers of pornographic type sexuality that have nothing to do with intimacy but much to do with titillation and voyeurism. In ordinary relations, mild sexual feelings can take the form of a pleasant type of flirtatiousness. But, if they are too intense they can become a problem. I note that online I am much quicker to form friendships with women than I am in person where there is more room for misunderstanding about intentions. In this sense, the Internet heightens my abilities to have friendships with the opposite sex. Sexuality can be a problem in parent-child relations: I think of a girl who had a wonderful relationship with her father until she reached the age of sexual maturity. Then she was then rejected by a parent who was frightened by the very idea that he had some sexual feelings regarding his daughter.

Age too can enhance or diminish intimacy. Growing old together can mean that a couple, of whatever gender combination, can learn to anticipate each other’s every need. The vision of young people is often clouded by the thrill of newness, idealized versions of other people, counterdependency needs, sexual urges, and inexperience. The other day I heard myself say to the new clerk in the cleaners, “what is your name? The letters on your necklace are too small for my eyes to read?” She responded, “Ellen, and I have trouble seeing things too as I get older.” My response was, “My eyes don’t see as well with age, but my vision is much better than when I was young.” In short, I was feeling that the perspective of increased experience that enhances with age, offers a better view than youthful eyes can often provide. On the Internet I feel frustrated when I do

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not know if I am communicating with a 20-year-old or an 80-year-old. My desire to have a sense of the age of the respondent is based partly on my inclination to relate differently with people on the basis of their ages. When I have a good sense of the temperament, values, views, and age of a respondent, I find that I am much more relaxed than when I do not. For example, when I learned that Evelyn was close to my age I felt closer to her than before.

Fear of loss is the enemy of intimacy. If we are too fearful we will not establish closeness. Some people respond to the fear by becoming highly dependent and needy; others by saying, “who needs this person anyway.” I think of a several times divorced woman, capable of enormous intimacy, whose automatic response to some problems with her fiancé, was to declare “go find someone else!” She sought to avoid the repetition of her trauma of abandonment by driving away her lover. In counseling, the couple had to develop ways of overcoming her strong impulse and his hurt reactions. On the Internet when the online “honeymoon period” is over, the question becomes just how will the relationship be nurtured. Online, friendships do need to be cared for especially since proximity cannot enable the parties to facilitate the relationship by reading body language and listening for slight intonations of the voice. Inaction is all that it takes to kill an online friendship. If one person doesn’t write for a while this may prompt fears of rejection and end the online friendship.

Time and care are essential for intimacy on and offline. My wife and I had to struggle to make enough time to nurture our intimacy. Even in my online relationship with Evelyn Sommers this issue came up as she kidded me about my cutting short my messages so that I could go water my plants to keep them from dying in the drought. As previously stated, the big problem with Internet friendships is that you do not really know if the other person is presenting an idealized version of themselves, based upon how they think they ought to be, or if they are allowing the full range of their personality to show. I doubt if we can ever know. Secrecy is the enemy of close relations. It is what allows the “false self” to dominate and thus allow the friendship to be built on a crumbling foundation. A relationship based upon false premises can, like a romantic novel, have lots of actions, but little intimate feeling. Openness and honesty, in person and on the Internet, remain the most solid base for friendship. On the Internet the challenge is greater or at least different because it is harder to check the reality.

In conclusion, intimacy is an ideal for which we strive on and offline. Though it is best in person, there are some positive aspects to online intimacy which I recommend. When I first began to think about this issue my sense was that there was a much more limited space for Internet closeness than in fact I found it to be, and I recommend it as a nice adjunct to in-person friendships. My new friendship with Evelyn illustrates this point, as well as the role of disagreement as a step towards friendship. The ebb and flow of closeness may be interesting to observe and participate within—it has certainly been for me.

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