Online chatting: a symptom, not a cause

I'm emotionally arrested, bored, neglected and looking for attention, and you're after a bit of the sex you never had before you married. Isn't it great that we met online? Of course, I was only looking for friendship.

There is to be a seminar this evening, at which members of the Malta Association of Family Therapy will discuss internet relationships between adults.

Karen Bishop, a family therapist who has researched the matter and will address the seminar, told The Times that adult one-to-one relationships on the internet, though they have significant impact on individuals and their families, are rarely discussed because the focus tends to be on adolescents and internet social networking instead.

Ms Bishop said that most of the people she interviewed for her research think that online one-to-one relationships and internet chatting are unacceptable for those who are in a committed relationship. But of course, there is a world of difference between whether you know something to be unacceptable, or merely say so because you know it is expected of you, and whether you would do it regardless.

Online chatting with people of the other gender (or of the same gender, if you’re homosexual) when you’re in a steady relationship or more so, married, is one of those gritty problems which, as Ms Bishop has noticed during her research, will cause friction between a couple.

One of the reasons it causes friction is differences of opinion between the two halves of the couple as to what the implications and dangers of online chatting really are. The other reason is that the person who is not chatting understands at some fundamental level that the person who is chatting has a problem of which chatting is only the symptom or manifestation, rather than being the problem itself.

Basically, online chatting sites do not create the urge to hunt for sex or succour; they merely feed a need that existed already. It is precisely that discontent which is the problem.

Let’s put it this way: you can’t argue with actual sexual cheating. The sexual cheat can’t claim that going with somebody else is normal and acceptable and that the objecting spouse or companion is old-fashioned and antiquated in going nuts about a little sex on the side.

If you object to sexual cheating, the response you get is not going to be a defensive, “You’re not going to tell me what to do. I have every right to sleep with other women/men if I want to.”

But that’s not how it is with online chatting, as Ms Bishop noted. Because there’s no actual sex involved (as far as we know) those doing the chatting think they’re in the clear and the objecting spouse/companion is wholly unreasonable in objecting.

“One may feel betrayed if the other spends time chatting online with a member of the opposite sex, while the one doing the chatting might insist that he is doing nothing wrong and is not being unfaithful by talking to someone,” she said. The trouble caused can be so great that couples turn to her for counselling when problems are triggered by what she calls ‘online infidelity’, and yet, she says, there is not enough awareness of what is going on, or what the parameters of behaviour should be.

Ms Bishop’s research reveals that online liaisons are common among Maltese adults, and that internet chatting in this age-group has more to it than the largely innocent friendship which adolescents seek. Adults use internet chatting primarily to seek ‘dates’, and because they think they have a better chance of meeting a partner online than in a social situation, she said.

But they are too ashamed to reveal this, or to talk about it to others, lest they come across as somehow inadequate, forced to resort to online chatting because they can’t interact face-to-face in actual social situations.

Karen Bishop found that Maltese adults are so focussed on their use of internet chatting as a way of getting dates and meeting people in the flesh, literally as well as figuratively, that they seek and develop online relationships only with other Maltese.

Chatting to somebody who doesn’t live in Malta is considered a waste of time and effort because there is going to be no opportunity for sex or what is often euphemistically called a relationship. Because the ultimate aim is to meet the person physically – and the online relationship is just the means towards that end – Maltese adults who chat online tend not to make fantasy figures of themselves, though they do withhold information.

To me, this is just another manifestation of Maltese pragmatism. Do nothing unless it can get you something. If you’re going to chat, why chat with a foreigner? You can get nothing out of that.

My own cursory research on Facebook – not the same as chatting, but close enough, given the way Maltese adults use it – shows, however, a great deal of difference in the way people in search of a relationship, whether they are married or single, portray themselves in their profile photograph.

Those who aren’t after anything will make do with a hasty snapshot, while those who are on the hunt, even if they are in denial about it, will go to a great deal of trouble to present themselves in some provocative (the women) or dark and dangerous (the men) pose.

Several of Ms Bishop’s interviewees told her it seems strange when they meet in person, for the first time, somebody they have chatted with online for weeks or even months, because they find they know so much about them. “They also said that their relationship progressed at a quicker pace online, both emotionally and in terms of sexual intimacy,” she told The Times.

I don’t find it surprising at all. This is exactly how relationships were conducted among the literate classes generations ago: people who were promised to each other didn’t meet and commune, unless it was on rare occasions and with the presence of a chaperone. They corresponded, often writing highly emotional letters in which they disclosed their views and their personalities.

These are the so-called ‘love letters’ which, if their writers went on to fame or fortune or both, survive to this day in published form. When you read collections of love letters, you will often find that they are not love letters at all, but intimate exchanges of another variety – what I like to call ‘this is who I am’ disclosures.

Of course, the difference is that the sort of people who go in for online chatting are rarely terribly literate or expressive, if the exchanges between adults on Facebook are anything to go by. And yet, they seem to be more comfortable expressing what little there is to express in writing than in spoken communication.

The absence of an actual voice makes the exchange at once more intimate and yet less so. Because there is no voice, the people involved feel removed and at a distance, and conversely, this sense of detachment makes them feel comfortable disclosing intimate details that they would never reveal when face to face with a person or even over the telephone.

Most sensible people know this, which is why they are alive to the risks involved when they become aware that their spouse/companion is chatting online and has built one or more so-called virtual relationships which are not at all virtual but only too real.

Disclosure of personal details and intimate discussion of moods and feelings builds intimacy between two people, particularly when they are of the opposite sex. All mature people know this, which is why women only tell men personal things when they seek deliberately to build intimacy with them, and ditto men with women.

The recipient of these disclosures feels special for having received them; the person doing the disclosing feels there is somebody who understands and cares. It is a story as old as time – the story called ‘my wife doesn’t understand me but you do’ – except that now, women are playing it too, because the internet has made it possible.

Consider the fate of a bored and perhaps neglected woman in her 30s or 40s (even 50s), without a job to keep her occupied, with the children off at school or university all day and her husband off at work from early morning until late evening. Her minimal chores done, she sits down, logs on, and spends most of her day compulsively chatting, or posting inanities on Facebook.

It seems safe, because she doesn’t actually do anything. Women, with few generally notorious exceptions, don’t hunt for sex like men do, but for emotional succour. But it’s a screaming cry for help if ever there was one.

You can argue that this is a safety valve, and that these women are better off exchanging naughty innuendos with men on Facebook or chat-sites than actually meeting them in some car on what they might think is an obscure country road for an actual liaison.

You would be surprised how many of those we get around where I live, day and night – quite dull and ordinary people too, not the sort who might star in some bodice-ripper.

But I don’t think so. That kind of obvious discontent, manifesting itself in online chatting and flirtatious Facebook exchanges, moves itself inexorably forward to its obvious resolution. A person in that state of emotional arousal cannot remain indefinitely suspended in mid-air.

Something must snap, either in real life or on the internet. The person who hunts like that for sex or for emotional succour must either find it or give up and resolve the difficulties that led to that state of being in the first place.

As Karen Bishop said, “Because it’s happening at home, people assume that it’s safe. They don’t realise that this behaviour can expose them, especially if they are in a vulnerable situation.”

Quite frankly, I don’t know what sort of person you have to be to begin the process of what Americans call ‘sharing’ over the internet with some man you don’t know from Adam, or just how naive a woman you’ve got to be not to know that online chatting is possibly the only known scenario in which grown men really are after just one thing, even if they kid themselves they’re not. And it’s not wiping a woman’s virtual tears, either, unless this is also a means to a leg-over.

Women would do well to remember that any man worth having is going to be anywhere but trying to pick women up via Facebook or online chatting sites. He may seem like he’s worth having, but if he’s behaving like that in the first place, then by definition he’s not.

If people are ashamed to admit, as Ms Bishop found, that this is how they’re casting about to get laid (men) or find a man to make them feel better about themselves (women), then they’re right.

Shame might be too strong a word, but embarrassment is about right. If our instincts tell us that there’s something odd about men who troll for sex on the internet while claiming to be looking for friendship, or unnerving about desperate housewives looking for what they think is a harmless alternative to going after the tennis coach or one of the married men in their ‘klikka’, then we should trust our instincts.

Nobody should allow their spouse or companion to persuade them that chatting online every evening, and possibly also every morning at work, out of sight, with somebody of the other gender is ‘normal’, or ‘OK’ or that ‘everybody is doing it and you’re old-fashioned’.

The short answer to that is: would it be OK or normal for this person to have exactly the same relationship over the telephone, and spend half the evening chatting using voice telephony?

Obviously not: nobody thinks it’s all right or normal for a woman to watch television while her husband chats and flirts over the telephone with some other woman, and not just because she can hear every word of one side of the exchange but can’t ‘hear’ internet chatting.

It’s just not done.

The outrageous unacceptability of it is beyond dispute. Online chatting is not in any way different, and the sooner we understand this, the better.

The trouble with Maltese adults is that they have, on the whole, a very poor understanding of boundaries. I see this in all spheres, but it is especially apparent when they find themselves with a broadband connection. The stark reality is that, whether on or off the internet, fatuous people can be relied upon to behave fatuously.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.