Love Online: Emotions on the Internet

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, April 20, 2009 by “Kimberly Max Brown” (Williamstown NJ)

I thought this book Love Online was very insightful. I wanted to learn more about how people express affection on the internet. “Love Online” explained in a scholarly fashion just how the internet may encourage the kind of conversational yet increasingly intimate chat and e-mail that often gets people into trouble with their relationships.

Ben Ze’ev is a philosopher, much more so than a psychoanalyst. He is keen to demonstrate how the philosophical mores of the internet (independence, lack of censorship, etc.) break down the usual barriers to intimacy (shyness, vulnerability, truth, attraction, availability, etc.). Thus, the power inherent in internet communication fosters immense changes in traditional social relationships.

Ben Ze’ev reinforces the old adage that the mind is most sexual organ, while highlighting the ways the internet is conditioned to sustain romantic and sexual cerebral play. Once the communicators begin their online exchange, qualities that are most keenly activated among offline lovers emerge. However, the links between the two conversants remain tenuous and ephemeral. Out of this soup of verbal chat, IM, e-mail, web videos, and blogging, many of the real world circumstances that seem to contain offline relationship disappear. For instance, regarding marriage, the author describes in great detail how the internet may undermine a commitment by flooding it with illicit sexual and romantic communication without the knowledge or consent of both partners. Though emotional and sexual infidelity of this sort may be obvious to some, what is not so apparent are the mechanisms in the human psyche that make this so attractive and powerful in the first place. Further, the author also details how such verbal intimacy is introducing new norms in marriage, such as sexually open, internet-based relationships.

In the end, Ben Ze’ev is making a strong case for the transformation of modern marriage into a relationship that accommodates internet influenced intimacies. For those who have fallen prey to internet romantic and sexual love, and the unfulfilled hopes and expectations that usually arise, this book will help to understand what happened. Anyone who thinks that legislating marriage between one man and one woman is useful hasn’t spent much time lately using the internet.