The joy of cyber
Yesterday was two years exactly since I met Babel. I hasten to clarify that I am not aware of that fact because I spent my free time counting the days since I have known Babel - I spend quite enough of my work life counting without doing it in my evenings too - but just because it was the day after my father’s birthday, and conveniently my father’s birthday is always the same day each year 
Of course, when I say that I met Babel, what I mean is that I saw him in reality for the first time, having actually “met” him three months previously in the JEB forums. It is an interesting question as to whether you can “know” someone when you have never met them in real life. My sister asked me about this this morning in fact, because one of her friends has just split up with her boyfriend, and my sister seems to think the failure of the relationship is somehow based on the fact that they bumped into each other on the internet.
Personally, I think that unless one person is deliberately trying to conceal their personality, you can get to know someone online just as well, if not better, than you can elsewhere. Of course there are personality traits which can only be conveyed in real life, and it is undoubtedly easier to fall out with a person on the internet because it is so much easier to read offence into a throwaway comment when you can’t see the expression on the other person’s face. But the flipside of the coin is that, at least for chronically shy people like me, it is far easier to tell express your thoughts and secrets in writing to someone who is not trying to look you in the eye. Everything is less embarrassing on paper.
I know that there is no way Babel and I would ever have become friends, never mind getting together, if we hadn’t gotten to know each other online. He’s not the sort of person I would ever have had the courage to approach, and I’m the sort of person who would have passed entirely under his radar. Had we randomly bumped into one another and started speaking, I don’t think that we would have hit it off, I think I would just have been scared and run away.
For shy people, the internet is a great invention. But the internet can of course only go so far, and if you do meet nice people online, it’s perhaps a good idea to try to meet them in real life too. That can be slightly traumatic, admittedly. Two years ago yesterday I was absolutely petrified about meeting Babel, so much so that I nearly stayed on the train as far as Melton Mowbray so that I could avoid him standing on the platform at Leicester.
That was back in the old days, when August was hot and sunny and Babel wasn’t so old he’d grown a moustache I’d been sent to Leicester for a day with work, and he volunteered to meet me at the station and help me find the client. Pretty much as soon as I met him, he was a bastard, saying something to embarrass me and make me drop my file case 
I don’t think he was any different in real life to how I had expected from the internet though, except that he was better looking. I hadn’t had him down as attractive before we met, having seen only a couple of appalling photographs on the net, but later that evening when we met up for a drink after work, it occurred to me that he might indeed have the potential to be attractive, in a masculine sort of way 
Sadly, the fact that I got off the train in Leicester that day means not only that my life has been blighted forever, but also that I have never been to Melton Mowbray. I think that Babel will have to take me there sometime to compensate Someone asked me the other day whether the pair of us had got together because of JEB/Esperanto. The comment surprised me in a way, because I don’t tend to think about it like that. We did technically meet each other through JEB and hence Esperanto, yes. But nice as Esperanto is and all that, it seems so totally irrelevant to our relationship that it would never even occur to me to think about it like that. We got together as a result of a bizarre chain of events, most of which I wouldn’t, however, like to publish on my blog. So perhaps going forward, I will actually answer the question, “How did you guys get together?” by saying, “We were both members of an Esperanto club”, thus avoiding the strange social stigma which seems to be attached to meeting a partner online. Whenever I say I met my boyfriend on the internet, I kind of feel like people take two steps back from me and narrowly surpress an urge to cross themselves. My overreactive imagination, perhaps, but it does seem to be regarded as a generally negative thing, which is a shame. Because to answer my sister’s question, there is no reason why a relationship between two people who met on the internet will not work out simply because they met on the internet
Tags: Esperanto, internet, relationships