E-mail Love

Never before have mental health professionals witnessed such a display of diversity as we see in our consultation rooms today. We live in an ever-growing, ever-changing world filled with individuals and couples from varied backgrounds. Clinicians are becoming aware of and recognizing the multiplicity of our patients—multicultural couples, interracial couples, interethnic couples, intermarriage, same-sex marriages, blended marriages/families, stepfamily marriages, etc. These patients are all changing the landscape of marriage and relationships. Yet, as mental health professionals, we have insufficiently studied two important contemporary categories—e-mail and long distance relationships. The ubiquity of the Internet results in people connecting today in ways never before imagined.

E-mail dating and the resulting love relationships are becoming the most unique ways of meeting and communicating with people since the advent of the telephone. People have the freedom to respond, not respond, or take their time to think

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things through regarding a potential suitor. The written word, as we learned from many famous Victorian writers, is one of the most powerful and seductive ways of communication. It is striking how after a few e-mails relationships can begin to deepen and grow into strong attachments. As in the case of Donald Carveth and Jean Hantman, this occurs without knowing the person’s age, personal life, or appearance. Yet something powerful happens.

Both Jean and Don are talented authors who share the same profession, love for discovery, and curiosity about psychoanalytic discovery. Both are a real find: she is an independent woman, skillful writer, successful psychoanalyst, and mother raising her three children alone. He is a trained psychoanalyst, professor, thoughtful author, and a loving father. Their match appears “to be made in heaven.”

From the inside looking out, this couple seems to have a perfect fit, an arrangement that works in harmony and synchronicity. They each have their own space and can do their own thing. Yet from the outside looking in from an object relations point of view, the relationship has an out of the ordinary, split-apart quality. Families generally live together and work through conflict—envy, sibling rivalry, domination, control, and jealousy—rather than avoiding it. This couple plays it “safe,” giving the kids the message that relationships are to be detached or far away, and that children come first and love and intimacy come next. One wonders about the impact on the children, and what kind of message it gives them. It appears that the guilt of the divorce on both sides may have created such trauma that they have found a way to enter much more tentatively into a close relationship. The essential question is, “Will this relationship, built at a distance, be enough to carry them through life’s journey and will it satisfy them when they are living together?”

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