Virtual Affairs, on-going contact with someone you've never met in real life, are growing in popularity. They seem innocent enough; they're not.
Virtual Affairs
"Oh, it's nothing, really; just a game..." This is what a lot of people say to justify on-line correspondence with people they've never met and usually don't intend to meet.
Lots gets said about the dangers of internet contacts: pedophiles masquerading as children, identity thieves "phishing" for personal data, spammers trolling for email addresses, to say nothing of the censure of porn web-sites. But little gets said about the ongoing electronic contact many establish with total strangers they "meet" in web-site chat-rooms or through internet services.
Few of these contacts lead to face-to-face meetings. The main reason is that people in virtual affairs rarely present themselves as they are.
A virtual affair is an interactive story, a fantasy, really, with two collaborating authors.
The whole point of a virtual affair is that you can present yourself as you'd rather be than as you are. You don't use your real name and you can shave years off your age; you can promote yourself in your job or pick another profession; you can change your gender; you can say you do things you only wish you could do; you can describe interests you only dream about; you can make yourself wealthy; above all you can make yourself more interesting. And the pay-off? Somebody pays attention to you. Plus it's the exciting attention of discovery.
So what's the harm? Virtual affairs are innocent enough if they don't go beyond email or instant-messages, right? And it isn't even lying, because you don't really expect to be believed, anymore than you really believe everything your virtual partner tells you.
So if you're just playing a game, why don't you tell your real-life partner about it? Because you don't feel comfortable doing so. And that's a big clue that it's not just a game.
What's really going on in a virtual affair is that you're establishing emotional intimacy with someone, and you're doing so by presenting yourself as you can't or won't present yourself to your real-life partner.
That's cheating on your partner; it's cutting him or her out of a part of your life where you're "going with your feelings." But you're not just cheating on your partner; you're cheating on yourself. The more you get into the fantasy of the virtual affair, the more you deny the reality of who you are for the sake of being a virtual someone else.
