Rise of the Online-Only Relationship

What is virtual, what is real - but more importantly, does it matter anymore? JL 

Christopher Mims reports in the Wall Street Journal, illustration by John Kuczala in iStockphoto:

The percentage of Americans age 18 to 29 who report not having had sex in the past year was 23% in 2018, where in the early 1990s the figure was half that. Many of them spend months or even years dating without ever meeting face to face. The technologies that make it easy to connect with others all over the world have yet to give them the ability to teleport their bodies. It’s possible to find someone who happens to share one’s particular combination of tastes. It’s one of the ways teens and twentysomethings are adapting to a combination of two demographic trends—earlier puberty and later marriage—using  technology.
If we’re looking for an explanation of why today’s teens are having less sex than previous generations, there’s this: Many of them spend months or even years dating without ever meeting face to face.

When Nicole Nguyen was 16, she met her first serious boyfriend for the first and last time—after they’d broken up. They had 20 minutes. They hugged once. It only happened because that day, they just happened to find themselves in the same state.
Yet for an entire year, they spent almost every waking moment texting each other, talking on voice-chat apps, and even communicating over webcams through Skype and Oovoo. Ms. Nguyen, 24, is now a pre-kindergarten teaching assistant living in Brooklyn Park, Minn. To this day her parents have no idea they ever dated in the first place.
They might sound unusual: online relationships that bloom, reach a fever pitch of teenage intensity and—possibly—even wither before the two parties ever meet. But they’re becoming more common than ever. Ask any teenager—if they haven’t been in a relationship like this themselves, they can probably name friends who have.
Liking someone’s Instagram is the modern-day equivalent of smiling at them across a crowded room. Every online service eventually becomes a chatroom—be it TikTok, Fortnite or any of the other countless distractions that allow people to connect.

“ Expectations of that eventual physical encounter can become so great, the couple fears their first in-person meeting could be a disappointment. ”

The technologies that make it so easy for young people to connect with others all over the world have yet to give them the ability to teleport their bodies as easily. It’s possible to find someone who happens to share one’s particular combination of tastes—but what are the odds they go to your school or even live in the same town?
While there is little or no research on the phenomenon of long-distance-only relationships among young people, it’s not surprising that it’s happening, say experts. It’s one of the ways teens and twentysomethings are adapting to a combination of two demographic trends—earlier puberty and later marriage—using the technology at hand, says Stephanie Coontz, emeritus professor at Evergreen State College and the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas at Austin.
“So you have a period of life of 15 to 20 years where people have to manage their sexual, romantic and intimate needs in ways that are more flexible than they used to be, and young people are experimenting with how to handle that,” she says.

Share Your Thoughts

What’s the most long-distance relationship you’ve ever been in? Did you learn or gain anything from being so far apart? Join the conversation below.

“The way me and my boyfriend met was very strange,” says Katelyn Bobbitt, 20 years old and living in Providence, R.I. “We originally met through a YouTuber who was streaming Minecraft.” What followed wasn’t exactly a whirlwind romance—more of a modern-day version of “Pride and Prejudice” involving chaste encounters in group voice chats on the popular gaming chat app Discord, and, instead of coy glances at the ball, joint play sessions on a shared Minecraft server.
“I started getting more and more out of my shell, which is something I did not do in real life,” says Ms. Bobbitt. “I became closer to these people online than I did with my friends I had in high school.” Eight months into their online friendship, Ms. Bobbitt and Jacob Ribeiro declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend, though they still had yet to meet.
A year after they first struck up a conversation in a YouTube chat thread, Ms. Bobbitt, then 19, told her parents she was in love and that she was getting on a plane to meet a boyfriend they didn’t know existed.
“I just straight up told them I’m doing this and you can’t tell me no,” says Ms. Bobbitt, who had saved money to pay for airfare. “But my dad was just like, ‘You better call me... You better tell me where this boy lives.’”
Now Ms. Bobbitt and Mr. Ribeiro live together.

The online environments that allow some people to cultivate more intimate relationships can also become a burden, however. Expectations of that eventual physical encounter can become so great, the couple fears their first in-person meeting could be a disappointment.
That’s what kept Seyar Tahib, a 21-year-old college student living in Fremont, Calif., from meeting up with his girlfriend, he says, even though they’d talked online on and off for a year, and had even begun “dating” without even hearing one another’s voices. Finally, they worked up the courage to meet, and everything turned out fine.
“We were just scared we wouldn’t feel the same after we met each other,” Mr. Tahib says.
Fear that people we know only through the internet might not be who they seem—or even claim—is perfectly rational. In the most extreme cases, people will create fake online personas, known as “catfishing,” to defraud the lonely.
In Ms. Nguyen’s case, both of the online-only relationships she had from age 14 until she was 16 ended when she discovered that the attentive, always-online boys she was dating were busy also dating other girls, online... and in real life.
Tiffany Zhong is chief executive of Zebra IQ, which gathers insights on the behavior and tastes of Generation Z, usually defined as people born since 1995. She runs an app and online community, of which Ms. Nguyen, Ms. Bobbitt and Mr. Tahib have been participants. Another respondent told Ms. Zhong that when she was 16, she had a brief online-only relationship with a boy two years her senior. Two years later, after she had ended the relationship, she discovered that he was in jail for assaulting a female relative.
Even when things are going well, there are other challenges.
“Long-distance relationships don’t give you the physical touching, which is so important in terms of what it does for people’s immune systems and their health—not just sexual touching but affectionate touching,” says Prof. Coontz.
Research connecting this change in behavior to other changes in the habits of young people is virtually non-existent, but it’s at least plausible that one reason America’s young people are engaging in less risky behavior than previous generations is simply that they are hanging out online instead of in person.
For example, the percentage of Americans age 18 to 29 who report not having had sex in the past year was 23% in 2018, where in the early 1990s the figure was about half that.
But America’s “sex drought” is not, in itself, a bad thing, says Prof. Coontz. Finding creative ways to address their psychological and physical needs with technology is just what young people do, she points out. On one hand, there’s a hookup culture enabled by apps such as Tinder, while on the other hand, there’s the emergence of online-only relationships.
“It used to be that getting into a steady relationship was how you started your life, now it’s what you do when you have all your ducks in a row,” says Prof. Coontz.