Three Online Love Stories by
Barbara Steinberg

I. Online Identity

I have never played identity games online, but I did find that writing conversational email released the leader, the artist, and the adventurer in a girl who had led an otherwise sheltered life. These parts of me, then released, invaded my real persona, and at 40, I moved from NYC to California to be close to Radio Free Monterey, my partner James, and see where life took me.

My core vision of online communities is "souls touching across wires." It isn't about conversation. It is when someone releases their inner power online and thereby changes the way you look at the world. I did this one-on-one with a man I met online in July 1994. It was from that relationship that I started asking questions. This is one-to-one. Can it be done many-to-many?

He was born in a shack in Appalachia. Abandoned by his father. Called bastard. On the GI Bill, he went to a community college in Michigan and got a job in a steel plant. There, he figured out a computer system to track manufacturing and 10 years later, ended up a vice president at a high-tech firm. He was making a half million dollars a year travelling around the world selling oil commodities trading systems, but he was dreadfully unhappy. Unhappy marriage. I had fallen in love with him, but then suddenly he left me. His wife took in a child from their adopted daughter's bad marriage and he put himself further into the box of duty.

One day, in a hotel in Houston, he asked the bell boy where he could get some marijuana. The bell boy led him to a crack house. He tried it. Last year, I visited him in a rehab center. This year, he lapsed for the second time and is in jail. He said he left me because, no matter how much I understood, my sheltered life would not have permitted me to understand what kind of a risk taker he was. He had ruined other people's lives with broken promises. He didn't want to ruin mine.

Online identity. There are things I understand about this man that no one else understands--the Appalachian Kentucky boy and what he wanted. I understand that with all his risk taking, he never had the courage to feed his soul. But I didn't understand the practical implications of the kind of man he was. I didn't understand the harm his broken promises had done, and he knew that, so this ultimate salesman left me because he loved me too much to make the sale.

Online identity. I wonder if you can ever know anyone but yourself.

II. Have You Ever Been Misunderstood Online?

I found that people can express an inner power in email that goes beyond conversation--a force behind words, which leaves a soul imprint with the other person that is sealed in memory and heart.

And when two people who have inspired each other in such a way meet in real life, they could have fallen in love not with the human being, but with these soul imprints, which don't necessarily have anything to do with what the person is like day to day.

At least, this is what happened to me. It was not a misunderstanding of a statement's meaning, which is what one would expect to talk about when answering this question, but a misunderstanding of who I was as an essential human being, and it came from meeting souls first in an online community.

He wanted that strong, confident woman. However, in real life, I was still insecure, still dealing with many demons of self-worthlessness. He promised the world, but was changeable, and I didn't know that because it did not come across online. Online, he was strong, too.

It was a disaster. I would say we misunderstood each other. I tried to call to work things out, but he started screening calls and keeping track of my movements with caller-id, and I didn't know it. Then he listed my phone calls, then I had a nervous breakdown.

I had fallen in love with his passion, which was so evident online. He was a technological genius on a level I had never encountered before. The way I thought about technology had changed. He gave me science.

And he saw that I had great ideas before I knew they were great. I had inspired him. He wanted to help me. He recognized my talent before I had any idea anything I was doing was worth a damn. But then he couldn't reconcile my need for support with my online personality.

It was a misunderstanding of the online soul's relationship to the real life human being. You can't have one without the other. They are not always the same person. Quite frequently, they are different and to someone who doesn't know you well, they could seem unrelated.

I recently saw the movie, "You've Got Mail." Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fell in love with eachother over conversations written by Nora Ephron, in all her wit and verve.

Those are not the kind of conversations people have when they venture into the soul of another online. They go deeper. They go to dangerous places. The results are complex and unpredictable.

And the misunderstandings can destroy someone to their very core. I will never trust anyone after this experience as I had before I met this man. He has taken that away from me. He stole my innocence--because of a misunderstanding, because he fell in love with the leader and found the child.

Yes, I have been misunderstood online. I should have been more careful. Online life rarely writes itself like a script in a Nora Ephron movie.

Written for trAce's The Next Five Minutes conference in Amsterdam, Holland, March 8, 1999.

III. James

As I was researching gun control on the internet for a class, I came across this man who had been debating NRA members in chat rooms for years. He had bowed out of the rat race and made his own world where he fought for human rights from the internet and by being a frequent call-in guest on radio talk shows.

I only used email to talk to him briefly. "My plane comes in at..." We never shared emotions over the net. It was all real life, but the internet came to play a very important part in our relationship and ultimately brought us together. We built a web-cast radio station / virtual community together, an online home for us and the characters in our world. Creating the community bond resulted in a lifetime bond for us.

I think it is interesting that the two online relationships I had, where I shared emotions, resulted in broken paths because perhaps too much was shared online. There wasn't the real life balance. In this relationship, online life played a huge part in bringing us together, but it wasn't based on one-to-one sharing. It was based on community building.

For the third piece in this trilogy, the happy ending if you will, I wrote "The Ghosts in James's Old Room."

There are moments in your life that change you forever but you don't know it at the time. Such a moment occurred when I first walked into James's old room on Cortes Street four years ago. He lived in a rooming house for men, shared a kitchen and bathroom.

Each inch of space from floor to ceiling was designed to perform a function, and all the functions worked together as a whole. His room was a system. The components were whatever he could scrape off the street and some stuff he got after a divorce.

The sun shone through a small window outside of which, there was a bird feeder. James knew all the regular pigeons. Net's bird cage hung from the ceiling. Net knew all the pigeons, too. James taught his cockatiel to sing the theme from Andy Griffith's old TV show because he was an Opie look-alike as a kid.

Tissues were in a box nailed under his desk, one hand-reach away when he was working on his computer. A TV was on a rack near the ceiling. He designed and made a bed that folded out from the wall so he would have space to be during the day, but a full-sized bed at night. The chairs had their legs cut off so they would fit under the bed when it was down, and a piece of exercise equipment hung from other hooks over the dresser. Shelves were built everywhere, when he could get wood.

There was peace in that room, an order that provided a safe haven from the lack of creativity imposed by the outside world.

From his chair, James could dream. And he had that computer, "the piece-of-shit NEC" as he calls it. The internet didn't say no. It just turned on. He argued for gun control with NRA members in chat rooms. He called into radio talk shows. He wrote editorials.

Then he built the radio kit and turned on the transmitter. Then the FCC threatened him. Then I came into the picture with the virtual community idea. I think I decided to work with him because of that room.

Mixing stereo, computer components, microphones, mixing boards, and plugs, he created an original instrument, the system that runs the RFM broadcast. I call it an instrument because the digital jockey who runs it has power over the production, and because each piece has a function. Every function is designed to release creative expression and works together to form a greater whole, just like that room.

When I looked around it that first day I thought, there is an intelligence here that has not been given a chance. Roger now lives there and hears ghosts.