​I Want Love to Feel Like the Internet

Sex and love are fucking confusing. What's most confusing, for me, is that sometimes they overlap and sometimes they have nothing to do with each other. How does a person decipher the difference? Sometimes sex is not love but it feels like love. Sometimes, one person perceives the sex as love and assumes that's the case for the other person, because the other person is passionate and some of the things they do in passion—gentle kisses on the eyelids or deep kisses on the mouth—could be interpreted as acts of love. It's elusive.

What's also elusive is how I recently ended up on Chaturbate—a cam site where you watch people masturbating live—at 5 AM, watching bros jerk off. Actually, that's far less baffling. This particular night's internet session began innocently at 3:30 AM with a little gay porn, during a bout of anxiety-induced insomnia. The plan was to pick a vid, get shit done, go back to sleep. But when you're browsing Pornhub for that perfect scene, where oh where does the time go? Suddenly, it was 5 AM, and, like Alice in Wonderland with compulsive tendencies, I had gone down the rabbit hole of a pop-up ad and entered live masturbation land.

My primary thought upon discovering masturbation land was: What a time to be alive! Like, holy shit. We are #blessed to exist in a world where such a profound diversity of dicks are caressed, tugged, massaged by their owners any time, LIVE, right before our eyes. Behold this real-time buffet of dicks, some even attached to dudes of extraordinary beauty. I didn't even have to leave the house. I was wearing a large t-shirt with a cow on it and these bros were working overtime for me.

At first I was content simply being an observer. I reveled in the physicality of what I saw: the visual aesthetics of the bodies themselves. It didn't matter that we lived in different states, and would never meet IRL. I wasn't looking for a commitment or to catch feelings. I had no desire to ask, "Where is this going?" It was like porn+.

Yet even when I watch porn I sometimes catch feels for the performers. If a performer is particularly attractive, the story is rich, and their interactions appear "extra sensual" and/or "loving," I begin to write my own narrative of longing. Likewise, as I sifted through the myriad of jerkers jerking, I began to feel that longing rise. Part of me will always seek to know a sexy stranger better—if only through the distortion of my own fantasy. Part of me will always want to know if they are someone I could love. Could they love me?

Through the Chaturbate advanced search, I began narrowing down the bros to those who lived in LA, where I live. Then I searched for those who were interested in women. Then I searched for the exhibitionists: the ones who weren't camming for money. I wasn't fully conscious of this in the moment, but I was definitely looking for bruhs who were trying to get laid. I was looking for more than a show.

One of them, we'll call him manbun911, was particularly gorgeous. He had a huge pink cock, bright blue eyes and a sexy way of moaning as he stroked himself. So entranced was I by manbun911 that I found myself typing comments, while he performed, from my screenname, veronicalodge666.

u have a beautiful mouth said veronicalodge666

u have a beautiful cock said veronicalodge666

thank u ;) said manbun911

what kind of shoes are you wearing? said veronicalodge666

ha ha. sneakers said manbun911

what kind of sneakers? said veronicalodge666

ha ha. check your private messages said manbun911

I wanted to know about the shoes. I felt like if I knew what kind of shoes manbun911 was wearing, I could know more about him. If they were Vans, or a nice Nike hightop, the manbun itself would be contextualized as an attempt at hipness: played out, a little 2014, but OK. But if they were dress shoes or weird white running shoes, he would possess more of a "romance novel breh" or "psycho" vibe. In those cases, there would be a ceiling to how much I could get into this.

But wasn't there already a ceiling? Why couldn't I treat this interaction simply as something hot, fun and weird. Why did I need to know his shoe-story? Was I looking for love on a masturbation cam site?

Months ago, in my quest to stop confusing instant chemistry with love, I made a commitment to stop sexting. Porn was still OK. Cam boys were all right. But there was a fine line between sexily messaging a cam boy and plain old sexting, and I was probably crossing it.

The difference, I rationalized, between my past sexting behavior and this kind of messaging was that this bro knew absolutely nothing about me. In the past, my fellow sexters had at least seen a selfie or a nude. They knew what my hair looked like, my stomach. Some knew my creative work. Often we had met IRL. But now I was like a phantom. Beyond my screenname, I didn't even exist.

is your pussy wet said manbun911

so wet said veronicalodge666

you're so hot baby said manbun911

i want to lick that tight pink pussy said manbun911

i want to lick it till you cum for me said manbun911

It felt good to be told I was hot. I felt wanted. Manbun911 was very invested in my orgasm. That was nice. But if he had never seen me, how did he even know I was hot? How did he know my pussy was tight and pink? Maybe it was loose. Maybe I didn't have a pussy at all.

It was weird to hear this dude use the same exact language that other dudes have used in past sexts. "Cum for me," "so hot," "tight pink pussy," are par for the sexting course. Yet in the past, I felt special when my fellow sexters used these words. This kind of attention, especially if coupled with compliments about my mind or creative work, was enough to make me feel loved. It seemed weird that this bruh, who knew absolutely zilch about me, was saying the exact same things. I could've been an 80-year-old grandpa. I could have been anyone. I wasn't special to him. And it's likely, then, that I wasn't so special to my former sexting partners either.

do you Skype? said manbun911

want to fuck on Skype? said manbun911

I looked down at my t-shirt with the cow on it. I thought about how well I've done the past months, not sexting, not mistaking sext for love.

brb said veronicalodge666

I quickly logged off the site.

Now I have another thing to add to my list of things not to do. No more messaging dudes on masturbation cam sites.

But I feel like manbun911 and his false compliments revealed to me a new layer in the odyssey of sex and love. I always knew, on some level, that sexting wasn't total intimacy. When you don't get sexted back in a timely manner, you realize that a person could just be throwing you crumbs. Crumbs can feel exciting, passionate, and powerful. They can feel like love. But they're still crumbs.

I guess I didn't realize just how crumby the crumbs actually were. Could it be that sexts past—sexts I thought were love-ish—were this crumby? Could it be that in some ways I've always been just an anonymous screen name: a ghost to sexters past?

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