Love Love is true in Second Life. We fall in love. The experience of being in love in Second Life brings with it, as does friendship, a lack of connectedness with the other (we can’t see the other person, we can’t look into their eyes, there is no touch and no smell). When falling in love, these missing dimensions of experiencing the other person become the source of intensified longing and desire. We want to hold hands. We want to look into each other’s eyes. We want to touch and kiss. We want to make love (more about this later in a separate post titled Second Life: Sex). To make up for these missing factors of the relationship we resort to fantasy. While there is certainly fantasizing on an individual level, there is also a very explicit shared fantasy of connection. This mutual fantasizing is expressed using words and is enhanced by various methods of experiencing things together, like for instance pose balls and romantic places. People in love partner in Second Life; I think to show others we belong together, but also, symbolically, to manifest and strengthen our love even further. At some point then there is also a mutual desire for the fantasy to become real, at which time we resort to voice and Skype. And we have all heard about the rare occasion when people who fell in love in Second Life met up in Real Life and continued their relationship there. When bringing a romantic relationship from Second Life to Real Life, we are shifting an experience from one world to another. The experience is the same, but the world is now different. Initially, there may be a struggle with this new surrounding or setting. But love is still there. Photo to the left by Huckleberry Hax
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