Ellen McCarthy is a wedding reporter for the Washington Post and she has published a book; The Real Thing: Lessons for Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter’s Notebook. This post is not going to be a review of the book, however there’s something in the book that stands out for virtual world enthusiasts.
Number 10 in the top ten reasons to call a wedding off is :
Your avatars got married in Second Life and that worked out, so you figure this will, too. It happened. I swear.
In isolation, this does not sound like a good reason to call a marriage off, indeed it’s not implausible for people to meet in Second Life and live happily ever after, it has happened, I swear. However if two people meet in Second Life and then decide to get married without spending any real physical world time together, that’s one hell of a gamble.
However to just dismiss a marriage because people meet in Second Life would be somewhat churlish. Ellen McCarthy hasn’t just made this up, she has interviewed people who got married and therefore at some point, a Second Life inspired marriage must have appeared on her radar.
One of the things that’s odd about this is that many people now meet online, taking it to the next level is another issue, but there are heaps of dating sites where people make first contact, some more to the point than others, but that’s a different issue. Virtual worlds can most definitely play a part because although people are represented by avatars, they can engage in a more immersive experience than simply trading text messages.
As virtual worlds get more immersive, there will be even more scope for them to be used as part of the wider dating world, so I don’t buy Ellen McCarthy’s reason as being a sound one, in many ways it’s a dated and stereotypical attitude.
Ellen has support for her view, in the form of a review of the book by Drew Gallagher over at Fredericksburg.com :
For instance, one chapter is titled “Top Ten Reasons to Call It Off” and reason 10 is as sound a reason as they come for not dipping your toes into marital bliss.
“10. Your avatars got married in Second Life and that worked out, so you figure this will, too. It happened. I swear.”
I had no idea what “Second Life” is, but I looked it up and confirmed it is a free online game featuring a virtual world where you can apparently hitch your avatar to another avatar and text and chat with one another. McCarthy has covered hundreds of weddings in her time with The Washington Post, but I don’t think you need that kind of experience or a psychology degree to recognize that marriages in “Second Life” probably don’t equate to non-virtual-world compatibility.
Ellen McCarthy has actually had the experience of interviewing couples on subject matters such as this and therefore has more information on which to base her opinion than I have, but it seems a little shallow on the face of it. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are now in happy relationships having met in Second Life.
You’re right! I know several couples who initially met in Second Life, eventually met in Real Life, and are happily married.
But while I would not say that initially having a Second Life relationship is a reason to run screaming from Real Life matrimony, Ms. McCarthy does have a point. For every happy marriage that started with a Second Life one, I can point to twenty or thirty or fifty SL marriages that broke apart. And I know of at least one SL-to-RL marriage that was an absolute disaster.
It’s like everything else that’s to do with people…you cannot generalize, you cannot deal in absolutes. Every relationship is different…but in this case, the statistics are on Ms. McCarthy’s side. So don’t call off the wedding — but take a good look at your intended partner in the cold hard light of Real Life.
I’m sure there are plenty of examples of good and bad relationships from Second Life and other online formats. An online only relationship does not seem a solid enough foundation to me, to take it quickly to the marriage stage, although even then I’m sure there are people who have successfully done that, but that’s fraught with danger.
I agree absolutely that you cannot generalise and deal in absolutes, there is no one size fits all solution to relationships.