It seemed like a harmless blueprint to pass away the long winter nights. I was particularly depressed this time when Christmas approached. I had spent November writing a current in 25 days as part of National Novel Writing Month. It was exhausting, but I had pounded out 55,000 words ahead of schedule. I should have felt great, but I felt lonely instead. You know what happens when people get lonely. They start looking for odd things to amuse themselves. That was how I happened upon the “adult” avatar website.
Yes, it was one of those avatar games. You have probably heard of other ones, like Second Life, that people set up and play and play and play. You can be anything you want on these games. There are no fat avatars. They don’t age or get sick. They may streak a petite funny sometimes, but they can pretty noteworthy do anything and everything. The thing about this particular region was the “adult” factor is the major selling point.
In short, it was the perfect thing to warm the frosty nights in December and January in Chicago. I am a lonely guy in the real world. I figured it would be nice to pretend I was dazzling and had a huge male member and see what kind of interesting things I could get into on the game.
It costs a bit of money to get on the game. Almost everyone on there joins as a basic member to peer what the site is like. To a normal person, this lasts about five minutes. You soon see how hot the female avatars look and soon realize you cannot participate in any of the “adult” activities that drew you to the site in he first place unless you upgrade to the VIP. That was what I did.
The thing is that people are social by nature. Before long you have friends. Within the context of the game there are “families” which are kind of like fraternities or sororities. Some of them have themes. On here you can be a vampire, werewolf, sorcerer, fairy. You can be a man and have a female avatar. You can be a woman and have a male avatar. You can have wings and fly. You can turn into a helicopter or a car.
So, it was only a matter of time before one of these families found me. It was one with a vampire theme, which was not something I was into. But the people in this little club were fun to hang out with and easy to talk to. Before too long I was offered an official membership and I was finding myself addicted to this amusing game.
That’s the thing about this that is so strange. It can be addicting. When you are like me and expend so distinguished of your time alone, wishing you were someone else, and here is a chance to do that, well, it’s hard not to get a little addicted. On this game I was handsome and muscular and could do anything. So, I found myself hanging with friends in the real world, but thinking about the game.
What I managed to do, however, was not fall in love. Sure, there were people I had regular avatar sex with and felt some kind of attachment to, but it wasn’t anything I would call adore. Of course, there are those of you out there who will say that you can’t fall in care for with one of these things. I say that as long as the feelings are there, what’s the difference? If you say you love someone on a game and feel it when you say it, I don’t gape the need to quibble.
All of that changed, though, the day I met her. It was just one of those chance things and those happen in the real world as well as online games. My shrimp online “family” was dealing with some internal issues and it required some one-on-one time. I was left to my own devices.
There is an area of RLC known as the lagoon. It is a giant underwater kingdom. In the valid world, I cannot swim a stroke. On RLC, I can swim underwater indefinitely. I ended up in a place called the Lagoon Caves where she was a blond-haired avatar swimming near a digital octopus. Something inside me said it was time to say hello. To this day, I wish I hadn’t.
She and I hit it off proper away. She liked to ask a lot of questions. I checked out her profile and saw her photos. If the photos were exact, she was gorgeous, with blond hair and the kind of body that most men would slay for. Her profile said she was twenty-two years old. In conversation with her she said she was twenty. It was fair the first of many lies to come.
We spent that first evening dancing underwater. Again, this is the kind of thing you can do when you are digital and don’t have to worry about things like, oh, I don’t know, drowning. We danced in each other’s arms near the octopus. Eventually we retired to the Mermaid Caves, which are essentially underwater bedrooms.
She hit me like a thunderbolt. I had been in love before, of course. But I hadn’t felt that bolt from the blue like I did with her. She told me she was a virgin that night. To this day I can’t say for sure if that is lawful or not. She would go on to stutter me a lot of things.
The next day we spent sending each other e-mails via the RLC Social Center. This soon progressed to sending e-mails to each other’s e-mail addresses. She told me that women fall in love with their hearts and men fall in love with their heads but I peaceful don’t know for sure what that means.
It was several days before she would be online at the same time I was. She was new to RLC and spending considerable of her time in the lagoon instead of with friends. The addiction had not yet hit.
I made a serious error at that point. You inspect, I had another friend who, in real life had a boyfriend but she would spend her evenings and spare time online with people like me. She said she and her boyfriend had an arrangement by where she could have as much avatar sex and as many online false relationships as she wanted as long as they stayed online. She was to never give her real name or talk to anyone outside of RLC. Foolishly, I concept that was possible and tried to arrange something like that with this girl.
I told her I aloof liked her, but that this was RLC. I smoothed things over, but right then and there I had set an ultimately fatal rule for our relationship to come. I spent the night with my friend, well, most of it, and it was beautiful and then I went to bed in the actual world.
I then spent the next day e-mailing this blond girl I knew only by her avatar and the photos she had posted on her profile. The e-mails soon turned to another night of chatting and avatar fun and then, suddenly, she wanted to talk to me. I was on the phone with her. Her sing was beautiful. We had a fun night.
The next day I went for a long walk and decided to call her. We talked. I told her about the relationships and friendships I had with people on RLC. Again, I was quiet trying to set up some sort of life where she could be the real thing and then I could still play around on this game. The game still had its hooks in me. She seemed hesitant, at first, to keep talking to me, but then that didn’t last.
Before too long we were telling each other we loved each other. It all happened within the location of a week. Crazy, you say? Yes, more than likely. I was lonely and she was willing to gain in love so much she was willing to say the words without brilliant what it really meant. We were spending three and four hours on the phone at night talking. She had some interesting stories and all of these, when you look at them now, with the distance between the waste of the relationship and where I am now, you watch the holes in her story. Things just don’t add up when you step support and look at them. But I was a sucker and I wanted to occupy.
She told me she and her family were from Puerto Rico. She had an accent. I found the accent adorable. She said she was twenty. She said she lived on her own in a house owned by her father. She said her mother wasn’t her birth mother. She said she had an older brother. She said her family was wealthy.
I asked her what her father did for a living and received a stunned silence. “I don’t want to talk about that right now,” she said. That was a red flag, but it was also intriguing. She said her father wanted to control every aspect of her life and even tried to choose a husband for her. He was a young man studying to be a doctor who turned out, she said, to be gay. Her father didn’t know about that and couldn’t understand why they were not together anymore. He kept offering to come by her someone else and would find her anyone she wanted.
Our later conversations said she felt her father might be keen in “bad things.” According to her story she noticed people coming and going to her house at all hours and overhead strange conversations. She also noticed the blueprint people would suddenly change their behavior around her when someone would lean over and say something like, “don’t you know whose daughter that is? “
Again, that kind of story should have sent me running, but it didn’t. She was twenty and she was gorgeous, if she was to be believed. She was funny and she was sexy. She said she loved me and she said she was a virgin. She was every man’s dream, if they allow themselves to let their imagination run wild.
She said she had lived much of her life in Puerto Rico and was now living here in the states on the east glide. She told a story about once being addicted to painkillers. She said she was addicted to the point where she would talk to doctors or go to hospitals and complain of wound when she had none. She said she had been rehabbed. At the same time, her addiction to the game seemed to be deepening.
She said her father had hired bodyguards to follow her every day. He was so protective of her that he chose her college major. Despite her being addicted to prescription painkillers, her over-protective father, who had hired bodyguards to gaze over her 24/7, picked Pharmacy as her major. So, her father who wanted to protect her so much that he hired men to watch her and tried to pick her spouse wanted her to enter a field where she would be surrounded by the things she had been dangerously addicted to. It made no sense, but I chose to ignore it.
Her father supposedly owned the house she was living in, or so she said. He did background checks on her roommates, was her tale. She had never dated in high school, she explained. Her only relationship had been with the young gay doctor.
She said she took pills to preserve her calm. She suffered from anxiety, she said. She told me she often got paranoid and would start acting “crazy” when she was off her meds. Again, any normal man would have started running for the nearest bar and gotten off the phone and the website, but not me. I stuck around.
To me, this was real. We began talking about spending the rest of our lives together. We talked about marriage. We talked about having children and a family. We talked about where we would live and how we could glean married. We used the word “cherish” constantly. I started texting her every morning so there would be messages waiting for her when she woke up. I talked to her every night. To me, it was now real and then I made another mistake.
To me, now that we were “real” there was no longer a need for the game. I pulled away from playing the game. Yes, I had friends there, but I told them I was now in a real life relationship and was going to have to expend time with that person in the staunch world. I tried to let people know that I was going to step away, but I ended up hurting some of those friend’s feelings.
I had gone through my addiction phase with the game. For me, it was time to focus on what I was perceiving as “real.” To me, the game was hazardous. With so many people on there, the chance for cheating seemed real. I suddenly decided that I was in love with this person and no longer wanted to risk hurting her by having an online relationship and then a real life relationship with her. I wanted to remove the temptations and the risks. So, I relied on talking on the phone and via other chat programs such as Yahoo Messenger. For a while it worked, but what I hadn’t counted on was the addiction to the game growing within her.
At first it was fine. I had to work all day and although she was in school she wasn’t in class all day. The game was something she could do and keep herself occupied while I worked. I knew she had met a man she called “Sir O” on there and that they were close as friends. I knew she was making friends on there constantly. To me, there was a separation between the two lives. At night she would pull herself away form the game and we would use our hours talking on the phone. We would exercise other nights chatting on Yahoo. We shared dreams and desires. We talked about places to visit and how our life would be. We shared our fears and our wants.
The first cracks to appear were shortly after our first anniversary. We had met on March 17 and on April 17 we spent a lovely time celebrating our one month anniversary. Our exchanges that day were elegant and loving. I even bought her a present and sent it via e-mail. But shortly thereafter she went through her monthly cycle. It was then that I saw just how crazy she was during that time.
She warned me about this. She said that during that time of month she tended to pull away form people and preferred to be by herself. She said that everything would suddenly make her want to fight. She stopped talking to me during those three days, saying she didn’t want to talk. I got some very terse and angry text messages during that time and had one conversation that was obvious it was going to be an argument, but we avoided each other for three days. Then, advance that Tuesday, we seemed more in love than ever before.
What I didn’t know was that she had taken that time to become more addicted to the game. She was starting to push off events with her friends to spend time on the game. She was arriving late or not at all to family events to spend time on the game. It was only a matter of time before me and our relationship would become secondary to the game.
I now know it was a combination of things. First, there was the fact that the game was allowing her to be and do whatever she wanted. As she once told me, “things on there are impartial more fun.” Sure, you can fly on there and swim. You can have wings or fangs or turn into a werewolf. You can be with anyone from anywhere and everyone looks beautiful and sexy and perfect. The second thing was that “Sir O” had gone from being known as “Sir O” to “Anton.”
It was a short time later that I was sitting at work with Yahoo Messenger on, as I did and would often get messages from her during the day. She came on and said, “Bryan, I have feelings for Anton.” I was shocked. I was stupefied. It felt as if a giant hand had reached into my chest and yanked my heart out by the roots, holding it still beating and dripping with blood and training veins and arteries in front of my eyes.
I freaked. We spent a lot of time that day chatting and on the phone. I made it clear. I did not date cheaters. I did not and do not remain friends with exes. If she was with him, then she was to lose me. If she wanted to be with me, she had to prick off contact with him. She said she would. We seemed to get even closer.
I have never been the type who gets over relationships easily. I devote myself to the one I love completely. They become section of my life. I associate things with the person I love and they become forever tattooed with them.
For example, I cannot watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” with Jim Carrey. For me, it will always be associated with a woman named Amanda. Amanda and I were together for two years despite her living in Canada. We spent several days together near Christmas in Toronto together. We spent the day Christmas shopping. We had a blast. We ended the day by going to the movies and seeing Jim Carrey in green fur. During the movie, where the Grinch is building his sled, she assign her head on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my arm. So, to me, that movie is what I contemplate about when I watch it. She left me just over a year later and so the memory is painful now, forever marring that movie for me.
I am not the type who breaks up with people. I am almost always the dumped rather than the dumpee. And I cannot just shut off the love machine in my head. I am still in love with that person. Knowing that they picked someone else over me does not make me wish them well. I do not wish them well. I am standing there with my heart in pieces and I want them to feel the hurt I feel. I cannot just be their “buddy” and know they are doing things with another man that I wanted and do still want to be doing with them. I can picture them together, holding hands, making love, kissing, sitting together, in my head. I cannot just smile and pretend I am elated for them. I am not.
So, I don’t play the game where I become friends with my exes. If it happens at all, it will be years and years before I am comfortable with it. With some, I don’t think it will ever happen.
So, we made a go of it again. But I soon learned that she was talking to him again. I had a devastating Saturday morning, after a night where we had watched a movie together, where she told me her feelings for this “Anton” were stronger than she first thought. She told me she was confused and wanted to take 10 days away from both of us.
I was devastated again. I said that if she really wanted me, she should take ten days away from him. She promised she would. She said she thought her feelings would fade for him. After a couple of days she told me her feelings for him were different and she loved me. But then I discovered she was still with him. She was drawing pictures of herself in his arms and posting them as her profile photo.
We had made plans to try and meet face-to-face in May. We wanted to see the movie “Wolverine” together. She said that she was afraid to tell “Anton” or any of her online friends about us because when she had attempted to do so before they always asked if we had met yet. When she told them no, she said they always said that we weren’t valid then. I thought that meant she had very pushy and very rude friends and they shouldn’t be so goddamn nosey about her relationships.
So, the problem was she would always sever the relationship with “Anton” and then feel bad for him. He was paying the VIP fee to be with her and he deserved an explanation. In fact what it was, was that she was in love with him but clinging to us. She couldn’t give him up because she was addicted to him. She didn’t last four days away from him.
I put my foot down again. I was growing paranoid. Every day I pictured her with him and knew that every time she was online she was online with him. I pictured her and him together and it drove me crazy. Each day I was nervous and agitated. I spent a week where she was trying not to speak to him listening to her feeling bad about it and crying. I made an trouble then to try going back on that damn game. It was too diminutive, too slow.
She loved the game, she said. She said she wanted to share it with me. She said she would make time to share with me on there. However, she had friends on there who wanted to spend every moment with her and she refused to tell them that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. So the times we spent together were disasters where her friends kept messaging her and wanting her to be with them.
The first night she spent entirely with the game and not with me was a Thursday night. I went to bed in pain, feeling snubbed. She apologized and said she would make me a priority. Then she did it again a few weeks later. Then we made another “date” where we were going to watch the same movie together again and she didn’t show. I went on the game, hoping she wasn’t there, only to find her there in the mysterious “Anton’s” arms. She had not only picked the game over me, but there she was with him.
A fight ensued. It was over, I said. She came back apologizing. I said that what she had done afflict and it wasn’t the fact we both owned the damn movie and could gawk it anytime, but that she had made plans with me and then had chosen the game and him over me. She said she understood, but it was a ticket that things were ending. Her addiction to him and the game was almost absolute now.
She began staying up all night to talk to him. He supposedly lived in Vienna. He was supposedly married. If any of it was true, then he should have been spending time working on his marriage, but instead he was filling a young girl’s head with lies about love and his devotion even as he was lying to his own wife. Liars know how to lie and cheaters know how to say the proper things. It turns out my blond avatar girl was as much of a liar and a cheat as he was.
She ditched me again one more night. We had another make up session. I had a lovely Saturday where she assured me that she could have an online boyfriend and a real life boyfriend and that her feelings for “Anton” were different than they were before and not the same. She assured me that my love was enough. It was a lie like so much else.
I had several friends that became addicted to the tales of me and this relationships. One in particular, a friend named Vickie, told me from the start that this person was a liar. She urged me to run a background check on her. She said that the final warning that everything this person had told me was a lie would be when the time drew close to when we planned on meeting if she suddenly backed out.
That came on a Friday night. The night before she had hurt my feelings because she had a friend coming in from out of town that weekend. To me, that meant we should spend time together on Thursday. After a day of text messages and e-mails that she loved me and missed me, she suddenly had to do “other stuff” and we ended up barely speaking Thursday night. I swallowed the wound.
It turned out she had her dates wrong and her friend was not visiting that weekend. Friday night we watched a movie. She said she loved me. Then she said she wasn’t sure she would be able to come watch me in two weeks as we had planned. The bright red flag went up in my mind.
Then, suddenly, the next day, she was barely talking to me. I would say I loved her and she wouldn’t say it attend. I found my dad sick when I went to visit my folks and I texted her. It took her hours to respond and when she did it was, at best, a cursory text message. She hadn’t called. I was inflamed and went to spy a movie that night. We had a brief argument that night and then made up. Then I said, “I love you” and she laughed and said, “OK, good night.”
Sunday dawned shiny and beautiful. I went for a budge and called her. My dad was feeling better and I was relieved. Then I asked her about the whole “I love you” thing. She said the words Amanda had said to me in 2002 and that I had been dreading. She said, “yeah, well my feelings have changed.”
I was hurt. I staggered. We engaged in a text message war. I hurled the one insult I knew would get her. I told her my friend Vickie had said she was a cont artist just getting off on manipulating my feelings. Before long she was in tears. She said I had afflict her. She then told me she was having her monthly cycle and that was why she had been behaving the way she had. Of course, she hadn’t told me this anytime before. I began apologizing. She told me not to talk to her.
The end dragged on about another week. We didn’t talk for several days. My friends all got to hear from me. I was in agony. I wanted to pick up the phone constantly and call her. I realized I had become as addicted to her and she had the game and “Anton” the home-wrecking, cheating liar.
She called on a Wednesday. First she texted and tried to give me dating advice. I called her and this lead to a long conversation. She was in love with “Anton” and he was going to divorce his wife and she was going to move to Vienna and they were going to live happily ever after. I told her that being her age and a “mistress” was not a noble aspiration. I gave her stats about the number of married men who actually leave their wives for their mistresses. I gave her stats about the men who cheat and how often they cheat again.
Her parents would never forgive her, I said. “Anton’s” wife’s family and his wife would hate her. His family would likely hate her. She would be abandoning her family and friends to be with a man who cheats and would likely cheat again because once a cheater gets with the woman he is cheating with, the excitement wears off.
She seemed to change her mind. Then she spoke to him again that night and when I spoke to her that night she cried and said she was sure she loved him and he loved her. She then asked to be friends again but I said no and hung up. I spent some time crying and then I spent time talking to friends. Then I went to sleep.
In the morning I woke up angry. I called her and started in on her again. I wondered how she could have such low morals as to think breaking up a marriage was the right thing to do and then she said something to me and I knew it was a lie. It was so obviously a lie it was like a giant hand reached down and ripped the love goggles off of my face. She told me she had just e-mailed “Anton” that night and broken up with him. I knew she hadn’t and if she had, to have gone from being convinced she was in love with him the night before to ending it with him in the span of a few hours showed someone with great mental instability.
I was off the ride. I felt good that day. I even spoke to two women I didn’t even know and for me that was like orbiting the moon. I felt that I had not been “dumped” but just lost a liar and manipulator. I had to start questioning everything she had ever told me. The lies suddenly became so clear. I felt stupid for falling for it so completely for almost two months, but I felt a weight off of my shoulders.
Then came Friday night. I went out with a friend and we had a blast. When I came home she had sent me a message via Yahoo. It was a link to an article about dating. She ended the message with the condescending “I hope you are doing OK” and then added a smiley face emoticon. I was furious.
If she had been able to dedicate herself to us instead of caving in to her addiction, I thought, I wouldn’t need to be dating. How dare she? I was furious.
The next night I spent with a friend of mine. However, it was a night when the fury was gone and my heart ached for the lie it had fallen in love with. I texted her one word: ouch. In the morning I had the response that I was “freaking her out” and that I should just “get over it.”
It was then that the penny dropped. She was a sociopath, I thought. She honestly didn’t care about the people she hurt as long as she got her way. She was incapable of forming the correct emotional bonds that others did. Those feelings about movies and things that I associated with the ones I loved, she had none of those. She could “get over it” in a matter of days because the emotional bonds she had were not real. They were damaged and twisted. She was with someone as long as they amused her and then had no trouble shutting off the love and moving on to something else.
I wondered, did she honestly think that if “Anton” were real and really married if his wife would just “get over it” in a matter of days. Would she hear that he wanted a divorce and spend a few days being sad and then just bounce back into the dating world? Is that what she thought? Is that why she felt it was OK to have an affair with a married man? Did she think normal people who were truly in love just took a few days off and shut all of that down and then were ready to be “buddies” again?
There are seven stages to grief and psychologists say people go through them when anything “dies.” This can be an actual death and it can be the death of a relationship or even the loss of a job or house or anything people get emotionally attached to. When someone loses a relationship and a loved one, no matter how, most people go through them and sometimes it takes years. There is shock and denial and then there is pain and guilt. Then there is anger or bargaining followed by depression. Then there is an upward turn that finally leads to acceptance. Now, upon seeing that text, I was angry.
How dare she? I thought. How dare she just think that it was normal to be “over” someone you claimed to have loved enough to want to marry in a few days? How dare she have lied to me and cheated on me and just expect me to be happy with her moving on to some married guy from Europe…if he even existed.
So, I went home and I looked up the symptoms for anti-social personality disorder. That’s what you call a sociopath these days. There were seven symptoms and I felt she matched six. So, I e-mailed her the symptoms and broke down why I felt she met six of the seven. I then set up my e-mail so she could not message me back. I blocked, or thought I blocked, her on Yahoo. I made she was on ignore for RLC. I waited. I knew I would get a reaction and I was not disappointed.
She started calling me about 6 o’clock that night. I would send the phone to voicemail each time. She began texting. I have a phone that I can delete the text messages without reading them. I began deleting them. I can also delete voicemails without listening to them and I did that as well. I knew that the more I ignored her the more furious she was getting. My phone was like an angry hornet in my pocket as I drove back home from an errand that Sunday evening.
I called my phone carrier and soon had her blocked from sending me text messages. I couldn’t block her from calling, unfortunately, because she was not a telemarketer. I also found out she had not been blocked from Yahoo when a message suddenly popped up on my screen. I saw the word “weirdo” somewhere and then closed the message without reading it.
I had gotten the final word and finally played HER emotions like she had played mine. I was done.
So, what do you do when the masks come off and the one you love turns out to be a seething mass of worms and bugs in the shape of lies and deceit? Well, you spend a lot of time analyzing their story. Suddenly ever aspect of her life came into question. How old was she? What was her real name? Did her parents come from the places she said they did? I began to wonder if “Anton” even existed or if that had been an elaborate joke just to get me upset and play with my emotions. Was anything she told me at any point real?
I think the answer is “no” or, if some of it was true, it was close enough to “no” that it doesn’t count. She never really loved me. She never really cared. She never really had any intention of us meeting or being together. I was in love with, essentially, a phantom.
It has made getting over it a bit easier. Still, there are times I remember her face and voice and I think of the lies. I wanted to believe them so much. I wanted to believe a gorgeous blond virgin would actually want to be with a guy like me. There are times my heart hurts because it misses the lies and was happy being in them.
I don’t know what she plans to do now. I hope she is getting away from the game and joining the real world as much as the world is not fun. I hope that “Anton” was a myth and not real and she isn’t really choosing to break up a home for her own selfish needs. At the same time, if any of that was true, perhaps the two cheaters and liars deserve each other.
I wonder if there are others out there addicted to avatar games. I wonder if the lure of being able to do anything and look like anyone pulls more and more of us lonely and sad people into their web. I bet there are. I bet this will be an all-too common phenomenon before too long.
I have decided to try joining the real world. I still go on the game, but not to the extent I did. I am trying to move on and learn something from this. At the very least, I hope I can spot the signs of addiction much faster next time.
