5. Long Distance Attraction Formation

Two years ago, while I was attending a different university, I was close friends with a girl from England, whom I will call Emily, for anonymity’s sake. She was my tennis buddy and we were good friends during the year, but it was not a romantic relationship, rather a “best buds” kind of situation, especially since she already had a boyfriend. When the year ended, I had found that I would be transferring to a different school, and coincidentally, Emily was also going elsewhere – she was heading back to England to continue her studies at the London School of Economics. We promised to continue our friendship and keep in close contact with one another through IM, email, and phone.

Throughout the summer and during the next school year, we frequently exchanged messages with each other through IM and Facebook. She had told me that a few weeks before the school year ended, that she had a nasty fight with her boyfriend and they had broken up. She seemed to turn to me for consolation and I tried to give her the most encouraging and uplifting messages I could that the lean media types would allow me. We seemed to be getting closer and closer to each other the more frequently we shared our experiences with each other, especially since we were both transfers students to new universities. We shared what Wallace (1999) and Clark (1996) describe as “common ground,” which is the formation of attraction between two people based on mutually shared experiences or beliefs and the proportion of shared attitudes between each other. We could each relate to our shared sense of loneliness and anxiety associated with starting out in a new environment in which you don’t know many people initially. Also, since we were using mostly lean media, it was easy for us to manipulate the proportion of shared attitudes and beliefs we had between each other – not for the sake of manipulation, but to strengthen the supportive bond we had formed between each other.

The more frequently Emily and I had interacted with each other online, the closer we became, it seemed. I had sensed that an attraction between us was beginning to form – especially through our increasing underlying use of innuendo and double-talk in our IM/Facebook conversations. When her birthday came up, I had e-mailed her a song by G. Love & Special Sauce that was titled with her name, and at this point, as we were talking over IM, she became completely disinhibited (in which Joinson (2001) notes that CMC in general has high levels of disinhibition effects, such as self-disclosure, which is certainly true here) and confessed how much she regrets not having acted on her attraction while we were going to school together – an attraction which, I believe, she is imagining, because the attraction that was between us while we were together was not nearly as developed as the attraction that formed during our numerous online conversations. The proximity that we experienced, which Wallace defines as the sense of familiarity created by the frequency of online intersection, formed the basis for our newly developed attraction. I think it is interesting how we tend to believe that stronger bonds exist with others when in reality, they probably weren’t that strong to begin with. This is especially true, I believe, in the case of attraction, because our mind tends to go over the interactions we have with others and forms something that seems like nostalgia. Our mind ruminates and re-mixes the conversations like they were from a dream and places more importance in the relationship than it merits, and we thereby form an attraction for someone that probably wouldn’t exist if we were in continuous F2F conversation with that person, without the chance to mull over our interactions. Zajonc (1980) has a point when he says that “familiarity breeds attraction” especially in the context of online attraction and proximity.