Love Online

LOVE ONLINE: Emotions on the Internet. By Aaron Ben-Ze’ev.

Cambridge Univ. Press. 289 pp. $25

Most of the books published on love and the Internet fall into two categories: alarmist pseudoexposés (beware: people have cybersex!) and kitschy self-help manuals (listen up: here’s how to meet your future husband online!). What makes Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s work unusual is that he approaches the topic from a scholarly mezzanine, seeking to explain the Internet’s evolution from a cold fiber-optic knot to a strangely human place where emotions transmute into entirely new forms. Ben-Ze’ev, a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, wants to know what this means for the future of romance. Do we need to rewrite the rules?

Ben-Ze’ev has written perhaps the first truly thorough and thoughtful analysis of these topics. Defining cyberspace as “a psychological and social domain,” he breaks down the processes of falling in love, cheating, flirting, and having (cyber)sex in this odd ether. He explains the seductiveness of a space where you can be at once connected and anonymous, and the nuanced ways in which this affects relationships, often allowing for purer emotional contact. “Netizens,” as he calls them, may lie about their looks, professions, ages, and pasts, but they disclose deeper emotional truths online than when hanging out with friends, family, and spouses. That they may never meet in person, Ben-Ze’ev argues, doesn’t necessarily diminish the exchange. Cyberspace, in other words, qualifies as a legitimate reality with its own emotional ebb and flow, a place where “superficial politeness is less common” and “emotional sincerity is more important.”

Sadly, Ben-Ze’ev’s approach to emotions is so devoid of, well, emotion, that you have to remind yourself that he’s talking about the love lives of human beings and not the mating habits of plankton. The tone is relentlessly clinical, as when he describes falling in love: “The complex experience of romantic love involves two basic evaluative patterns referring to (a) attractiveness (or appealingness)—that is, an attraction to external appearance, and (b) praise­­worth­iness—that is, positively appraising personal characteristics.”

What saves the book from collapsing under such lingual sludge are the tales from the frontlines. “I have had cybersex once or twice,” a gentleman reports, “and it’s nice to have that instant feedback from the woman (God, I hope they’re women).” A married woman says that having “a cybersexual affair was a real wake-up call in my life,” one that “helped my marriage in the long run.” These testimonials ground the book, and, more important, remind us of the perpetually unpredictable nature of love and sex.

Ben-Ze’ev concludes by arguing that we need the mental malleability to integrate the Internet into our relationships. Sure, it sounds a bit frightening, but we’ve always fallen for people who tempt our imaginations in one way or another. Now our princes and princesses are simply pixilated, too.

—David Amsden