9/12/08: No one fits in infinite space of cyber chapel

I have this friend — let’s call her Balicia — who has tried Internet dating. After several possible matches, some of whom she knew only via e-mail and some of whom she met in person, she gave up.

It’s one thing to put your best foot forward on an in-person date. It’s another to have hours and hours to pore over every pixel in your profile photo or every word of your self-description. What are the chances that those moments that tell us we’re compatible with a potential partner — the slips of decorum that show the real person underneath, impossible to completely eliminate in face-to-face encounters — will show through in such a well-vetted venue?

What are the chances the deal-breakers will?

My friend found the whole process exhausting and not worth her time and, when her subscription to her dating Web site expired, she let it lapse.

I’m no Luddite, but I believe what most traditionalists do about courtship and marriage, and about the Internet and social fragmentation. I’m a fan of face-to-face interactions.

I’m in a dwindling group, there, though.

Henry Jenkins, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of several books, including “Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture,” defends online interactions as just as valid as in-person ones.

In one essay, he recounts his son’s experience with a girlfriend he met and maintained a relationship with online — a relationship that ended after a trip to meet the girl and her family, thanks, Jenkins implies, to her parents’ restrictions and ambivalent attitude toward her online boyfriend.

Jenkins claims that his son’s and the girlfriend’s emotions were no less real because they were usually expressed electronically, and I’m inclined to agree. Especially with teens who grew up with the Internet, typing could be just as significant as talking in forming relationships.

But Jenkins took his son to meet the girl, anyway. There are some things online exchanges just can’t provide.

The next step for serious daters, for instance — Internet weddings.

Internet weddings do exist, I was shocked to learn. The Chatalot Wedding Chapels, for instance, come in several varieties, including “gothic,” “enchanted,” “international” and “Las Vegas.”
Potential brides and grooms can select a chapel chatroom, password-protected, and e-mail invitations to their guest list.

The cyber wedding is bring-your-own-clergy, and assuming a pastor, priest or justice of the peace agrees to officiate, this seems to indicate a scheduled start time just as with a traditional wedding. How the revelry expresses itself — party guests popping champagne corks in the privacy of their bedrooms, perhaps? — is as much a mystery as whether the newlyweds need to be in the same room, or even the same state, when the vows take place.

Having a wedding online is bad enough, I thought, but my jaw actually dropped open when I saw the second feature of the basic package: a “reserved honeymoon suite with private password for one week.”

I know it’s rude to ask — I didn’t get a response when I wrote to Chatalot.com to ask last week — but what exactly would one do in a private honeymoon chatroom?

Probably not anything that couldn’t be done better in person.

Is this the way we recognize love and commitment in the digital age — as atomized individuals, separated from the sights and smells of the friends and cakes we intend to celebrate with?

The point may be moot, though: Cyber weddings are not legally binding.

Yet.