Heartbreak In Cyberspace

Have a seat. Switch on the computer. Dial into a network. Type in a password. And welcome to the world of the WELL — the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. Romance may be just a few keystrokes or the click of a mouse away. The California-based electronic bulletin board is one of the many new cybersocieties where men and women can meet and message each other in a network less smoky than a singles bar, less nerve-racking than a blind date. There are no worries about appearances. No flesh. No sweat. Utopia? No way. Romance gone awry has gummed up even this most sophisticated of social circuits.

Meet Lisa, Nancy and Beth (not their real names). In January, Lisa, 42, made contact with a man by way of the electronic bulletin board. Entranced with his terminal manner, Lisa allowed their e-mail relationship to progress to “voice-level” — that is, they called each other and soon were satisfying < their mutual lust in steamy phone sex that sometimes lasted up to four hours. The bills were huge. He lived on the East Coast, she on the West. Lisa thought she was in love, and she believed he felt the same way.

Nancy, 31, met her man electronically in May and began a near daily phone relationship that she found so satisfying it drove her to distraction. He made her believe she was the only one he was so intimate with, and he soon had her complete trust.

Beth, 38, also logged on to an intimate relationship with a WELL man. They communicated regularly, and he made her feel unique and special. Describing herself as “no naive young thing,” Beth nevertheless says, “when someone tells you what you need to hear, you begin to wonder if some kind of magic has happened.”

Lisa was so enthralled with her bulletin-board lover that she decided to move on to what WELL users call an F2F — a face-to-face. She agreed to split the cost of a plane ticket to fly her telephonic paramour to the West Coast. “We had a great weekend,” she says, “including fabulous sex.” But afterwards her lover turned cold, and the e-mail correspondence dissolved. A heartbroken Lisa grieved on a section of the network called WOW (Women on the WELL) — where no men are allowed. And that is how she met Beth and Nancy and discovered that they had all been involved with the same man. Let’s call him Mr. X.

The incensed women decided to go public on the general WELL — if only to keep others from falling into Mr. X’s trap. What ensued became “Topic 1290: Do You Know This Cyber-Scam-Artist?,” publicly exposing Mr. X to the WELL’s 8,000 members (among them, a high concentration of writers, journalists, musicians and Grateful Deadheads) and sparking a network-wide debate on the spoken and unspoken rules of electronic etiquette. Supporters of Lisa, Beth and Nancy sent their messages flying. “E-mail is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” said one. But there were plenty of opponents of the “outing” of Mr. X. “I haven’t seen anything posted here that suggests he did anything evil,” said a veteran WELL user. “The ugliness here smacks of a lynch mob out for good old-fashioned vengeance.”

Mr. X has come to his own defense. Though he admits he conducted cyberrelationships with more than one woman at a time, he insists he is the victim in this matter. “I feel my privacy was radically violated,” he says of the women’s electronic onslaught. “I didn’t make any relationship promises I didn’t keep.” In the bulletin-board free-for-all, he wrote, “I believe that I was supportive, caring and tender with these women. I gave as good as I got.” He adds, “I was experimenting in a new area for me. I didn’t think that the same concerns about fidelity I apply reflexively in physical relationships applied here in cyberspace. I was wrong.”

“This is a communal regime but the rules haven’t been made,” says Howard Rheingold, a WELL member since 1985. “We have people with different degrees of sophistication participating.” Until the affairs of Mr. X came to light, users could more easily overlook the potential for the abuse of the network. The illusion of safety promoted intense on-line intimacy — all behind the safety of a computer screen. Says Preston Stern, an ally of Mr. X, “The incident exposed in a very immediate way how the medium facilitates deception — emotional manipulation because of the absence of physical cues. It’s easy to keep secrets when you’re on-line.”

And so cyberspace cannot exist in a vacuum. Now, many of its denizens are mourning a paradise lost. Says one user: “The bottom line is that we can’t always trust each other and can’t always know who is worthy of our trust.” Why venture into an F2F when the party on the other side may think it’s just a game or an experiment? “I feel like an absolute fool,” says Lisa. “People look at a computer and fail to realize that behind those words is a real person with feelings.” Welcome back to the real world.