Summer loves: so far and yet so close

ON and OFF emails are very different because using the same medium—WhatsApp messages—they generate different moods and completely opposite results.

ON/OFF participate and take advantage of the possibility of accessing the Other without intermediaries and without all the impediments of immediate visual contact, the hesitation, shyness or confusion of finding yourself in front of the Other, whose reaction or intervention makes it difficult or impossible to convey the message – in this case, love – that you want to convey.

Speculative, adventurous, probing, confirmatory, fulfilling, unhealthy, resentful, or ultimate love. It's you saying what you want to say, expressing yourself without restraint or censorship. You are you spontaneously and, if you wish, impulsively. That's the good news and the bad news.

Using the same medium – WhatsApp messages – generates different moods.

ON knew of the existence of the person who wrote to her occasionally. They had met for professional reasons and had seen each other three or four times. They both lived in different countries. The messages she sent him were corporate jokes from the moment they both began collaborating on the same scientific publication. None of the messages this person wrote to ON gave him any indication beyond what he already knew or sensed about her: that she was an intelligent and fun person. Her jokes, her comments, her ironic messages about supposed scientific discoveries or the late payment from the journal's administration couldn't induce ON to do anything more.

Until one New Year's Eve, he received a song. A very peculiar one. ON doesn't even remember what he thought when he received it. He probably thought it was a message for his entire address book. He didn't hear anything else about it. A few months later, out of nowhere, he heard that same song. Then he was the one who wrote it. He asked her, "How are you?" He then told her he was listening to Morrissey say that things had happened to him in life that could turn a good man into a bad one.

They asked each other trivial questions until ON, at her prompting, confessed he had no plans for the summer. Her wife suggested they go to Sicily together. They met two weeks later in ON's city. He bought a new blue jacket for their first date.

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As he waited for her in the hotel lobby, he thought he couldn't remember what that woman looked like. Maybe she didn't like him, or maybe she was boring. She was pretty. She was fun. They still have to deal with Sicily.

The relationship, what ON experienced, has all the advantages of the age of being close to someone who is far away, while at the same time it can isolate us from what is close.

OFF's experience is the complete opposite. He talks about how a relationship that worked in person would despair and fall apart, becoming sad, anguished, and monstrous when they stopped seeing each other. Like that saint and apostle, OFF needed to see to believe. It wasn't just a matter of trust, but also a way of gauging feelings.

OFF ended up monitoring her WhatsApp incoming and outgoings, her online time, the last time she was online, why she took so long to reply, why she woke up so late, why she didn't send him anything as soon as she became aware of it, why she didn't miss him more, why she didn't give him what she received.

The ability to monitor their love, the immediacy, the creation of a narrative, whether negative, crazy, or truthful, having an up-to-the-minute scanner of the other person and their mutual feelings, according to OFF, destroyed a love that, without networks, would have otherwise grown and survived.

We disagree. It's true that before the technological transformation of the internet, people were more in control of their secrets, doubts, and feelings, but in this case, the desire for control, possession, insecurities, and manifest toxicity would have been expressed in any other way in that relationship.

We mention WhatsApp, but OFF also talks about perpetual stalkerism on Instagram and any app: who's looking at you, who's texting you, why are you hiding me, why are you doing or not doing something?

We recommend that OFF throw his phone into the sea and seek professional help. We recommend that the person receiving his obsessive attention file a complaint, block him, and move on. Sicily doesn't pay bad guys.