Advice from an expert: my quest

This last year after a spin-out and lots of doubt; I wrote Hara Estroff Marano, a writer for Psychology Today, after reading a thoughtful article she wrote.  It took her several months to respond and the post will be in the Jan / Feb edition of the magazine, but I thought I should share her wisdom with you.  I am not afraid of exposing myself - I learned a lot this year.

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Hara
I'm a seasoned dater and attempted a distance romance for the 3rd time and against my better judgement.  Over 2 months, we increased our communications from e-mail, to calls, and texting.  I think over time - more texting than calls but we still kept up every other day or so.  We finally met live, lots of calls the week before, and one week after - some busy stuff came up for him and he kind of dropped out of site.  I was not sure what was going on, by day 3 I started asked questions in text and e-mail (he couldn't / wouldn't call) and probably ended up the clingy girlfriend.  I'm not fond of some of my frantic tone - but I wondered if I did something wrong.  Ultimately, it lead to his thinking he was not up for the relationship.  He also felt I was impatient - and I'd have to agree - towards the end of the week I wondered why we couldn't talk or to set things straight

In your work with others, do distance relationships pose an extra amount of work on the right amount of communication?  Since we only saw each other after 2 months - I did like more communication - but in hind site, that couldn't have gone on for long.  I hate thinking of myself as clingy - but I will have to think about how I could work on this.  What I'm really wondering is if this is fairly common (over communication at first) and if there is any good advice if I ever decide to consider one again.

I could use some good input here.signed.... am I clingy and impatient?

Her response:
Love on the Internet

Starting, developing, and sustaining an online relationship for two months before meeting is actually a high-wire act. But because such relationships are easy to enter, we assume, mistakenly, that they are easy to conduct, which is why so many end badly. But wait—there's much more. Online relationships are almost always a kind of Rorschach test: They are more about ourselves and what we project onto others than what exists objectively. Online relationships are highly seductive because very little personal investment is required to initiate or respond to an online overture. But there's no way of knowing the intentions of the other or their real interest in or ability to invest in a new relationship, and confronting the matter is a sure turn-off. Is this person sincerely seeking a connection—or just testing the appeal of some facet of personality to see how others react? Is the person acting out of boredom or convenience or is there, somewhere ahead, a true desire for commitment? And as easily as someone clicked on, that's how easily someone can click off. Next! The hazards imposed by the extremely low barrier to entry can, however, be considerably surmounted. It takes moving communication forward at a measured, your turn/my turn pace, with equal contributions by both parties over time, so that the relationship isn't one-sided and therefore isn't illusory.

But that's not what usually happens. Online romances can feel quite thrilling (and some people engage in them just for such thrills, over and over again) because they tend to move very quickly at first; the cloak of anonymity encourages people to reveal a great deal about themselves without emotional restraint, and, very often, one party is doing much more of the revealing while the other is merely reacting or, worse, just an audience for the performance of the other. As Israeli philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze'ev puts it in his classic book, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet, there is a price to pay for attempting to conduct a relationship by solitary means—"the risk of being captured by your own desire."

Yet, for relationships of any kind to work at all, there generally has to be equality of investment every step of the way. Online, attachment develops separately and independently to differing degrees and at differing speeds in each party's imagination; there are no mutually experienced signals that normally regulate feelings, disclosures, behavior. Absent in-person contact, there is no meeting of the eyes, no means of developing a shared understanding of the degree of affection engaged or where each person may have a chance of fitting in the other's life. Each person is free to dwell in his and her own fantasies, to indulge emotions and project emotional needs onto the invisible other—without awareness that such events are going on at all—while deepening an investment in a relationship that...well, isn't quite yet a relationship. (And some people seem to prefer that kind of relationship to the greater demands and complexities of real social involvement.) Yet the strange mix of physical distance and emotional closeness keeps ratcheting up the intensity. Because online relationships are such a novel development in the history of humanity—a genuinely new kind of interpersonal experience enabled by technology, Ben-Ze'ev contends—our own emotional systems are totally unprepared for dealing with all their contradictory elements.

Another challenge to the development of relationships online is that electronic communication compresses time so that waiting three days for a response feels like something has gone radically off track. That, of course, only encourages your own anxieties to work overtime jumping to dire conclusions, and leads you to behave in desperate ways to preserve what seems threatened, which you may regard as a relationship but which may be far from having emotional traction yet for the other person.

All of which is to say, yes indeed, distance relationships impose a huge and largely hidden burden on communication from the start. Sadly, what you describe is a trajectory of ascending then declining investment—from email, to calling, to texting. Texting is almost the ultimate in communication convenience and not great for establishing a relationship. The medium is not conducive to articulating thoughts or feelings. As minimal is the psychic investment it requires, the time investment it demands is even lower—waiting for a light to change is enough for firing off a message. Any communication pattern that quickly settles into texting in lieu of other more participatory forms of engagement should set off alarm bells about interest level. In other words, there were signs that your relationship was downtrending before you and your friend even met. But it's difficult to countenance that when you're whipped up emotionally and high on the fumes of expectations. A smarter way to conduct an online relationship is to regularly test the continuing interest of the invisible other—by not rushing to respond to each communique and allowing the other person the opportunity to reach out and contact you. Had you recognized the signals, you could have saved yourself a lot of the disappointment you wound up experiencing and at least salvaged your dignity by not behaving in ways you despise.

But stop beating yourself up. Your friend was out of the relationship before he was ever in it. His withdrawal didn’t hinge on your clinginess or impatience; those became convenient excuses; it started much earlier. And it most likely resulted from the ease with which he was able to make contact online while you were doing most of the heavy lifting.

It's far easier to use electronic communication as a way of staying in touch with someone you already know well. You don’t have to give up the hope of finding love online. You just have to approach it with intelligence and reasonable restraint. Because online relationships pose the built-in risk of being more unilateral than mutual—more imagined than real—it’s best to allow some breathing time between responses. And I don’t mean heavy breathing. Further, because two months is a long time for sustaining an intimate relationship with a stranger, it’s best to move for a face-to-face meeting sooner rather than later, before anyone’s emotional investment gets too deep.

Thank you Hara - lots of other good sources I sought suggested the same about meeting as soon as possible.

And so we learn.

signed,

Much wiser now