True Love Can Exist in the Twitter Age

Annabelle is 24 years old, Australian and works in advertising in New York. Emily is 19, American and studying maths at university in Ohio. They describe themselves as "two non-lesbians in a lesbian relationship", and spent Valentine’s weekend together at the Ritz in Cleveland. I know this because they each tweeted about it extensively, sharing pictures of Emily’s breakfast divided on four separate plates, vague threats about the multiple uses of a Swiss Army knife V-day gift and updates on how things were going at their respective Greyhound bus stations as they made their way towards each other for a romantic weekend in the jewel of Cuyahoga County.

They are strangers to me, and before our hour-long Skype session for this article and a few tweets about feeling like a perv while reading their often explicit exchanges, we had never spoken. Otherwise known as @annabelle_nyst and @TEENSLUT666, the women met on Twitter and their relationship appears, at first glance, to be a prime example of what the New York Times recently called the “Soulmate in a Box” – or Smiabs – phenomenon.

Daniel Jones, editor of the Times’ "Modern Love" column, says these online-only relationships are surging in popularity as technology "alters our romantic landscape". Annabelle and Emily certainly started things the way that Jones describes the infancy of most Smiabs (v cool abbrev, NYT): "Typically, two strangers [cross] paths via social media: on Facebook, through dating sites or by retweeting and 'favoriting' until tweeting turns to flirting." The geographical inconvenience of these relationships rules out the possibility of anything happening IRL, he says, and when people drop the "where is this going" question things easily snowball into "the most obsessive relationship in their lives".

Annabelle and Emily can’t remember exactly how their relationship started – who fav’d who first or RT-ed what. But it can certainly be viewed from the outside as fairly obsessive, and the two tell me that it’s "way worse" in private than their daily outpourings on Twitter. Attempting to tell the story of how they "met" leads – like a lot of their stories – to a mix of usernames, laughing quibbles over whether someone had DM-ed or texted first, and references to screen-capped convos they both still have, somewhere.

As they try to piece it together, they address each other, not me. "I heard about you because I followed this guy, @thomas_violence," Emily says. (Annabelle interjects: "He’s so great.") "Yeah, he started that hashtag #StraightPeopleProblems. Anyway, he was tweeting about you and said people should follow you because you had just joined Twitter, and I would fav your things but not follow, because I was like, 'She’s new, she’ll follow me.'"

"She played hard to get for a while," Annabelle notes. "I’d DM her and she’d wait, like, two weeks to respond. She thought I was a Catfish."

Now, the two tweet at each other non-stop, checking in a few times a day to say cutesy things to each other, bemoan the distance between New York and Ohio or make oblique references to future sexy meet-ups. Of the two of them, Emily has been on Twitter much longer – "Since 2008, but I didn’t become, like, a real tweeter till I dropped out of boarding school," she says. "I had no life so I just started tweeting a lot."

Emily’s earlier tweets were about drugs and violence and sadness (“IVE MADE MORE BROKEN PROMISES TO PILL BOTTLES THAN TO MY OWN PARENTS”), a far cry from the kind of loved up, occasionally saccharine stuff she tweets now (“JUST SPENT THE  MORNING LYING BUM-TO-BUM WITH @ANNABELLE_NYST FARTING ON EACH OTHER HAPPY MLK DAY”). Her Tumblr is still a loop of syringes, erotica and crime scene photos of dead celebrities. In the early days of her Twitter use she would mostly "find crazy drug addicts on Twitter and talk to them because they were interesting". Emphatically, she says, "I MADE #DrugTwitter."

Annabelle’s account was, by her own description, "the polar opposite". Continuing, she says: "I found her account and I was like, 'This person is no one I would ever associate with in real life.' But I was drawn to her – I felt like there was more there. Like, the tweets were mostly fucked up drug tweets, but I honestly thought TEENSLUT666 was a character you invented.”

Emily says, “It is, kind of.”

An awareness of RT frequency, users’ relative popularity and favstar stats underlies most of the anecdotes surrounding their early romance. Emily says: "She didn’t have 2,000 followers until we met in June. I remember that specifically because she was like, 'I'm not going to sleep with you if I don't have 2,000 followers.' But she’s gonna surpass me soon. She’s closing in, like 200 behind me."

The two are loyal to Twitter over other social media. Emily doesn’t have a Facebook – "I don’t like social media that is a supplement for people you know in real life. If I already know you in real life, I know you, that’s enough" – and Annabelle doesn’t really use hers. "Twitter takes up too much of my time, it’s scary. I don’t have the energy for other applications any more. I’m on Twitter all the time, so why would I also want to be on Instagram and Facebook all the time? I still have to live a normal life."

The two DM-ed for over a month. "I would say 98 percent of the reason people DM each other is to flirt, probably more now that you can send pictures," says Annabelle, adding that she doesn’t have much experience in that department. "I was on Twitter for a month or two before I found Emily, so…"

Once they advanced to texting, it was ON: Their first Skype session lasted seven hours. When Annabelle won the green card lottery they were able to meet up for the first time, in June of last year, in Chicago. A few weeks later, Emily took a bus to NYC and stayed at Annabelle’s apartment for two weeks.

"My roommate was like, ‘Uh, we saw on Twitter that someone called Teen Slut off the internet is coming to stay at our house?'" says Annabelle. "Now they get it totally, but at the time it was hard to explain." The two acknowledge that meeting over Twitter sounds a bit weird, but contest that it’s basically the same as meeting on a dating site; Jones claims Smiabs turn out the same regardless of which online platform they used to find each other.

The two women chronicled the entire process of their courtship, screen-capping key texts and sending screen-grabs from Skype sessions when they progressed past tweeting or subtweeting at each other. Says Annabelle, "I don’t think we hide anything. I kind of have the view that once it’s out there, it’s out there. My Twitter timeline isn’t a running commentary on my relationship – I tweet a lot of sappy shit, but I’m a writer – sometimes it’s not even about us, it’s just something I wanted to write somewhere. I’m not gonna tell people what we’re doing all the time, but there’s never been something where we’d be like, 'Let’s not tweet about this.'"

Emily summarises: "I tweet about whatever I’m doing, so if I’m doing Annabelle, I’ll tweet about it."

This is where the couple pokes the largest hole in Jones’ takedown of relationships that blossom and function largely on the internet. He says, "We’re always searching for new ways of finding love that don’t involve having to feel insecure and vulnerable […] That’s the worst part of the whole love game, putting oneself out there to be judged and rejected. So when we get the chance to hide – whether through typed messages we can edit and control, or by saying whatever we’d like over Skype without expecting the relationship to ever turn physical – we’re freed from much of that anxiety, and we’re fooled into thinking this may be a better and truer way of having a relationship."

But Annabelle and Emily aren’t trying to hide at all; they’re exposing the aching vulnerabilities of new love not only to each other, but to thousands of followers.

Do they keep anything off the internet, I ask – fights, maybe? "We don’t really tweet about fighting," says Annabelle, before being interrupted by Emily: "But we have! We do."

"Yeah, but it’s more like we’ll passive aggressively tweet at each other, not like a subtweet, but more like a sad tweet in the middle of a fight."

Emily continues: "You can retweet the Favstar notification for having, like, 100 favs of that tweet the next time you have a fight."

Neither of them is worried about the possible repercussions of these constant shares (although Emily is trying to keep her Twitter persona away from the eyes of the admissions departments of the New York universities she’s applying to transfer to). "I made a decision a year or two ago where I decided I’m just gonna put myself out there on the Internet," says Annabelle. "It’s a great way to connect to people, just writing down what you’re feeling. The more you put online the less you have to hide. It just became a habit for me, and it’s like second nature now."

Eight months since their first date in Chicago – and hundreds of @replies, tweets and RTs later – they’ve become A Thing. People (including the ladies themselves, on occasion) refer to them as a "Twitter power couple". Tweets of each other’s texts or pictures of hickies inflicted over a weekend visit get hundreds of favs. Other users tweet things like, "The greatest American love story I know involves somebody with the twitter name @TEENSLUT666 so up yours Hollywood," or, “this is what your love looks like", with a picture of a sunset (a sunset!).

When Annabelle was unemployed and the $140 (£85) bus ticket from New York to Ohio was getting to be too much, someone suggested they start a Paypal account, in case any of their followers were feeling generous. They fundraised enough for almost three round-trip tickets. On their marathon second date in New York, a coffee shop under Annabelle’s apartment had written "Marry Me Emily" on their specials board. Annabelle took a picture and jokingly added the caption, "SHE SAID YES."

"People lost their minds," Emily says. "Just sending congrats messages and telling us they were so happy for us. It was like.. 'Oh no.'"

"We joke about it," adds Annabelle. "Like, ‘Babe, if we broke up, Twitter would be devastated.’ We don’t take it too seriously, but I do get DMs from people that are like, ‘You give me hope!!’ Someone sent me a message that said, 'Your love for your girlfriend is a religion.' I get messages like that all the time – Vased God sent me one the other day that said 'Love is real.' Like, people would actually be sad, I think, if we broke up. Us too, of course."

Would they tweet their break up? Annabelle says, "I think we would be obligated at this point to let people know."

"They would know, immediately," Emily agrees. "I think I’d have to un-follow you, but I’d want to creep. … We’re mostly hoping we don’t break up."

While, for most of us, the idea of looking back at our old, emotions-heavy Internet Content (s/o to LiveJournal) is a living nightmare, Emily and Annabelle aren't worried about retrospective embarrassment. "I’m basically already embarrassed," says Emily. "I’ll look back a week and be like 'WHY DID I TWEET THAT?' I feel like, if you don’t have a small pang of regret immediately as you tweet something, it’s not a good tweet."

Both think they’ve lost more followers than they’ve gained from their stream-of-consciousness PDA, but admit that the tweeting about and at them has increased. "I think the excitement is coming from people realising that this is legit – almost a year is a long time for Twitter – and we really care about each other," Annabelle says. "We sort of expected everyone to hate us for being so into each other online – I mean, who wants to watch a couple interact all the time? I don’t."

In agreement with Jones, she says love connections on Twitter are common, but fleeting: "It’s really incestuous. I was at a 'tweet up' in New York and everyone was telling me about all these relationships I hadn’t even realised were going on."

The average Twitter relationship, Emily explains, has four stages: "There’s the DM stage, the text stage, the obsessive subtweeting stage and then the pinnacle is when they meet for like a weekend – it’s always a weekend – and they tweet about each other nonstop and post photos and share, share, share. Then immediately after that weekend, it’s like… over. For some reason or another, something always happens, and then it’s never the same."

In this observation, they line up perfectly with the New York Times piece, as Jones cites this first in-person meet up as the most common Smiab pitfall. He suggests online couples are turned off when confronted with the reality of a flawed human in place of the carefully managed online brand they have come to love. "They only got to know what was served up, a two-dimensional collection of images, text and, for some, audio," he writes. "When the messy parts of us aren’t on display from the beginning of a relationship – when awkwardness and fumbling and being forced to be present without a mouse-click escape hatch all enter the scene – it’s hard to catch up."

Emily and Annabelle agree that there’s a big difference between a relationship conducted exclusively online and one that also exists IRL, and say they tried to hold back on declaring too many feelings before they met up in person. "By the time the end of May rolled around, we were basically like, 'I’m in love with you… but low key. It’s casual.' We made sure not to be in a relationship or say we loved each other til we met," says Emily. Annabelle says they wanted to establish "that this was a real human connection" before saying I love you, "because it's really hard to know – although, online, you almost get to know each other better than you would in real life."

Jones’ piece suggests that this feeling is misleading, that learning about a person through a series of drawn-out, but ultimately heavily edited conversations, does not lay foundations for a successful transition to real-life love. Annabelle disagrees: "When you rely entirely on verbal communication, your relationship can progress quicker, but that's because the communication is more meaningful. It’s not like texting someone 'I’ll see you in 3 hrs,' and then you just go to a movie or dinner or get drunk. We got to know each other really quickly; we asked each other, like, every question you could ask another person. I felt like I already knew who she was before I met her. But I know that's not everyone's experience."

Both said that their online personas weren't much different from themselves. "I didn’t want to portray something that was noticeably better and then have her in real life be like, 'Euuughh, no thanks.'" Annabelle says. "I think, if anything, the fear is that you're not going to live up to the other person's expectations; I really tried to represent myself to Emily as I am."

What’s most interesting to me is that Emily and Annabelle’s relationship has not only lasted longer than the average online/Smiab set up, but that it’s spawned a sort of mini admirer-cult – a collection of other online souls celebrating that love, in all its emotional, embarrassing, giddy, frantic vulnerability – in a place where people are presumed to be very carefully guarding themselves.

"Twitter becomes a refuge," says Annabelle. "It’s a really important community to a lot of people. It certainly is to me. The group of people I’ve found who are talented and interesting and who I like to read – it feels good to know they like to read what I’ve written. It’s nice that people are so supportive of us, too. [Emily and I] are on Twitter a lot, sure, but that’s not our whole relationship. It’s more like a vessel that makes long distance easier."

The whole concept of Smiabs plays into what feels to me like a very baby boomer conception of the internet as a different "place" to the real world. On the other hand, as with sexuality, gender binaries and what constitutes work time vs. leisure time, the millennial (ugh) generation sees the interplay between online and "real" worlds as something more fluid; and they have to. We carry the internet with us everywhere we go. We’re surrounded by Wi-Fi. Online culture has permeated our everyday life in such a way that it is impossible to see cyberspace as something wholly separate, where everyone carefully manages their brand at all times.

Who has the energy to be convincingly inauthentic when our real selves, flawed as they are, exist without effort, and are just as mineable for content? After all, it’s not embarrassing to tweet about your feelings if everyone else is tweeting about theirs. Just as the stigma surrounding embarrassing online pictures is receding as it becomes clear that literally everyone has taken a nude selfie at some point, Annabelle, Emily and many like them present the possibility that laying bare one’s feelings might go the way of the published sext. Perhaps the shame of presenting one’s raw self will be eliminated as it becomes the norm.

Annabelle says, "I think our generation is headed towards more and more openness, [and] I think that’s where we need to go. To be at a place where you can let it all hang out, and be really open online… that’s really cool, to me. I don’t think I have anything to hide as a human being." We chatted from about 6 to 7PM on Saturday night. At 2AM that night my phone buzzed – it was a tweet from @TEENSLUT666: "finally just hung up with @annabelle_nyst tbh."

I laughed, then tweeted something kind of lame at my boyfriend, because what the hell, right? That’s how I feel.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey