Now that Valentine’s Day is nigh, and people are getting ready to soak in love, flowers, chocolate, lingerie, fragrance, power tools, go on, I wanted to take some time to think about those who may be soaked in something other than love.   Maybe they are sopping wet with heartbreak and pain.  Because Valentine’s Day is not just a day to proclaim love.  For far too many unfortunate souls, it’s a time to be cast off.

And in this social media-soaked world we now inhabit, a lot of this dumping is coming through something even more impersonal, and more painful, than a terse text or email message.  It’s coming through terse Twitter tweets, or abrupt changes of availability status on Facebook.  Or even worse, knifing Facebook posts.

I myself resisted the Facebook craze for years, until friends convinced me I had to join because I needed the platform to market the book I so dearly hope to publish soon.  Part of the reason I resisted joining was because I didn’t want to get mucked up in the much publicized, often unsocial madness of the site.  But eventually, I did join. 

Some time before I joined Facebook, I became active on Twitter.  I like Twitter because it’s a terrific way to make real contacts that can be useful in business and in one’s personal life.  I’ve gotten to “know” on a fairly decent level some prominent journalists and other celebrities.  And it’s a good source for news.  Though, to tell the truth, even I, a nobody living in the Midwest and nowhere near the world’s most beautiful woman, have picked up more than a few stalkers on Twitter who constantly write me impassioned direct messages and have joined Open Salon so they can write really long impassioned missives.  It is incredible to think how much these guys believe they know me, and my essence, just from my writing and my photo. 

Anyway, everyone has read or heard about the unreality of virtual relationships and the fact that if virtual relationships are to become real, they must, at some point, become real.  Like in touching real skin and eating real food together in a real restaurant.  That is, if both parties really want real.

Let me tell you the story about a close friend who thought she had become extraordinarily close and “real” to a man she first encountered on Twitter and not long ago fell chest first into the liquid nitrogen-cold, piercing pain of the knifing Facebook post. 

It began simply enough.  She had followed him on Twitter and not long afterward, he followed her back.  Turns out they had met many years earlier, though they now live far apart.   Within no time at all (I think it was hours), the direct messages moved from Twitter to Facebook to email and even to a real telephone conversation.  They had everything in common.  They could have been separated at birth except for the fact that their connection was not of a sibling nature.   There was smoke, fire, lust, rabid interest, and admiration in their keyboards.  Within that first day there already was talk of flying to see one another.  Soon, they were “talking” by email for hours every day, day after day, without fail.  They usually corresponded late at night, probably owing to the time difference, though they did communicate during the day some, especially at weekends.  This went on for months.  Occasionally (but only very occasionally, as it turned out), they would talk on the phone. 

But it was not all incense and roses.  He had serious issues, including smoldering anger and hurt from a divorce that had happened some years ago and grief from the recent death of a parent.   Much of what he wrote concerned his pain and anger.  She had once been rather successful financially and had only recently started back on the road to more substantial monetary riches.  I was worried.  She was too, even though she was knocked nearly senseless by his seeming intense interest.  She spoke of things with him that she had not discussed with men she might have married.  He talked about his childhood and his much adored children.  He sent her dozens and dozens of photos, including some of “those” kind of photos, but also some lovely pictures of his children and his home.  She sent him a few pictures, though hers were mostly quite tame.  They gushed about each other’s beauty, charm and grace.  They marveled at how they found each other.

As the weeks went by, he continually put off plans to visit her, or for her to visit him, though the correspondence intensity continued.  He told her that if things were going to work, she was going to have to move to his city.  She agreed.  She sent him a present to mark an occasion.  She didn’t get one in return.

Then he sort of fell off the map.  The depression we all worried about, the depression that was evident from his earliest messages and letters, had bolted toward the sky like a rocket from the ocean’s depths.  She tried to understand.  She told him to take the time he needed to sort things out.

She did hear from him just a bit in the weeks to follow, he said they would talk on the phone, and they did not.  She also heard from a friend of a friend who knew him fairly well who told her that specific details would be unpleasant for her to hear but that she should strongly consider placing her affections elsewhere. 

Then the real blow took place. She had listed him as a close friend on Facebook so she got regular updates about his posts.  One involved a woman he’d recently friended.  She read the flirtatious exchanges.  Then came the comment that dealt that icy knife to her heart (combined with the warning about details that would be too unpleasant to hear, along with her own growing sense that she had gotten herself into something probably quite, if not bad, at least untenable).  It concerned the fact that he said he only wanted a beautiful woman like that new friend.

She cried and cried, mostly over her own foolishness and gullibility.  She wrote him and said she’d heard she had no reason to be concerned about his depression and that if she had heard wrong, if she was on the wrong track, he should call.  If she had heard right, she said she would go away.  He wrote and said he wasn’t seeing anyone and that they would talk on the phone that night.

You guessed it.  He never called.  He never wrote.  A few days later, at the urging of many friends, she unfriended him because she could no longer bear to see his posts and they could no longer bear to feel helpless in the midst of her searing sadness and feelings of failure.  So many of us thought he might have been the “real” and intelligent and handsome and worldly man that was finally right for her, the man she had been searching for all these many years, albeit with eyeglasses often set to “looking for unworldly perfection.”  We told her he probably had many other women in his computer.  That maybe this was how he operated, going from one virtual affair to another.  We didn’t even want to think (well no, we thought, and plenty, but we didn’t want to say out loud) what he was doing to satisfy his real sexual needs.  That made her cry some more but I think she knows we are probably correct.  We know she still cares deeply for this man and continues to worry about his mental state but we hope the powerful solvent of time will erase those cares and worries.

As it is, she’s very recently become real friends with a wonderful and perhaps even more successful and talented man she had met in person while she was handing this other guy the custom-made wrenches to squeeze her heart.  I think she now realizes she had wanted to meet this man, had long admired him as well, but was in no position at that time to see that guy as genuinely fantastic.  This other man is actually much more to her taste (most of us, though not all of us, think he’s way better looking than the virtual guy) and is radiantly happy, inquisitive, remarkably brilliant (and capable at algebra and calculus), and able to choose good red wine. 

They don’t Facebook.  He doesn’t like it.  He barely tolerates Twitter.  I don’t know if this will develop beyond, again I emphasize, a real friendship.  But I think she is quite open to the possibility.  Quite.  She likes the fact that they’ve actually shaken hands and drank real cocktails while sitting next to each other in a real bar.

So all just might end well after all.  I think I can say with certainty that she never again wants to visit the painfully unsocial side of social media.  Neither should any of us.  Not on Valentine’s Day or any other day of the year.  Because virtual Valentines are, for the most part, just…not.