Let’s start here: there was a summer when I’d wake up holding my own hand.

I can’t remember how it started—just that one day I woke up and my left hand was in my right. Clasped between them was complete and utter disappointment.

The fantasy (there’s always a fantasy somewhere beneath these things) was that I was with a man who loved me. Maybe one day I’d wake up and my right hand would be his right hand. Maybe, if I wanted it badly enough, I would wake up and he would be there. Even though I didn’t remember my dreams, I couldn’t help wondering if someone had been visiting me in them, using my body as an extension of theirs. Maybe there was someone out there who wanted to hold my hand and could only do it like this, through me.

Before long, my obsession with this shadow lover began to colour everything I did.

That summer I lived in a lonely rented casita behind a loving family’s home, barely furnished and tucked away under two big elm trees. Eventually everything took on a new gravity. I couldn’t do anything effortlessly. There was no waking up, drinking a cup of coffee, easing into my day—I was too unfocused or maybe too self-conscious. Like the feeling you have when you become too aware of your own breathing, I was an alien in my own skin.

For weeks, everything was like this. Any time I wasn’t with my imaginary lover was unbearable. But because there was only a shadow, without a person to cast it, I felt like this all the time. There was no one to miss—only the sense that there should be someone, somewhere.

Time was stuck. I was in limbo, perpetually standing at the edge, waiting to fall into a dark valley.

There would be no throwing myself into a secondary obsession, I soon learned. No redirecting the energy. If I tried to read something, or watch something, or listen to music, nothing would register. If I tried to sleep it away, I would wake up empty, left with the strange feeling of witnessing something I could never experience. I was completely captured. If not by love, then by a spirit of love. A spirit that was constantly streaking across my home in manic, chaotic bursts, anxious to find a body.

Weeks gave way to months. I was not myself. Sometimes I drank, and in excess, hoping it would help me come back, but alcohol only threw my situation into sharper relief. In every conversation, I was somewhere else. I only yearned more.

And then, finally, in the fall, there was an avatar: someone for this poltergeist to possess. But I would never be able to say that it found a body. We met online.

We had “known” each other for a while, maybe a year or two, to whatever extent you can “know” someone by a username and text posts alone. He and I would chat occasionally, but we weren’t friends, not even by the internet’s standards. Most of what I knew about him, apart from his writing style and profile picture, I intuited: his gender, his age, where he lived, how he lived, his profession, his appearance. All of these I had to pick up through subtext.

What I knew for certain was that he had a predilection for the worst type of sophomoric, internet-native humour, characteristic of posters during the early 2010s. I knew what his “politics” were, or at least what he used as a social currency online, a set of beliefs that I found as distasteful as the jokes. Ten years ago, I could have told you that his online persona was fated to age poorly. It smacked of the insolent, adolescent rebellion that could only be expressed by a frustrated twentysomething. But I also knew he must have been intelligent; there was a talented writer there, somewhere. Now and then, insight would peek through abrasive forum posts like sunlight through Venetian blinds that someone thought they’d shut tight.

In September, amid a week of being shuffled to and from uncomfortable professional events that were supposed to make it easier for me to secure an internship, he and I started talking more. First, I sent a grainy, Instagram-filtered photo—the first picture I had ever sent to an internet stranger. It obscured my face but emphasized my waist. It was an attempt at telegraphing, “I’m not online this often because I’m ugly.” (Even though I did believe that, I didn’t want him to.) I received a similar photo in kind, a blurry quarter jawline and a faceless, full-body selfie, likewise encumbered by the era’s cloying yellows and oversaturation.

Two insecure signals that the person on the other line might be normal.

Finally, we moved platforms—perhaps the only universal online gesture of seriousness—away from the forum where we’d met. It was after I’d sent him a meaningless but too-emotional confession.

When will things get easier for me? I wrote around two in the morning. How can I be more like you?

He responded by asking me for my phone number.

What did I think it meant, being “more like” him? What was this joie de vivre, this lack of self-consciousness, I thought I was picking up from a stranger’s forum-post history?

He never answered my questions, though how could he?

How could he tell me when things would get easier when all I had been to him up to that point was text and a 180 × 180 picture of a “Persocom,” a fictional android companion from a comic book I’d liked as a middle schooler, and maybe some anodyne observations about current events?

Still, the vulnerability, the act of asking at all, meant something. It allowed us to start speaking more and more.

Texts became a daily deluge. We began with good morning the minute either one of us woke up and then logged every last thing each one of us did throughout the day. Every stray thought; every strange or, more often, completely ordinary thing we glimpsed on our daily commutes; every meme; every reaction to every post on the forum where we’d first met; everything we consumed—alcohol, food, media.

Between us was a highway of information constantly moving back and forth, back and forth. And everything in this two-way stream felt valuable—the half-second differences between responses, the way certain words were spelled, the occasional changes in punctuation. A space between a word and a period—like this: “hi .”—was never good, for example. Over time, I learned that the distance between punctuation and word represented emotional distance.

In 2011, it seemed crazy. It probably sounds much less so today, in a world where we are always connected to one another. Back then, there was something a little novel about the idea that the volume of our communication had endowed us with a sixth sense (he felt it too)—one that could also sense something physical.

I remember a friend at the time comparing the nuances of digital communication to learning a language where a single character could contain a thousand different meanings, depending on where it was placed. She was right about that—a single emoji could mean five different things, depending on how it was sent and when it was sent—but I think she missed the bigger picture. It wasn’t like learning a new language; it was a new worldview. You were developing a set of skills that made sense in a digital environment where there was no body language.

The problem was that they opened you up to hypersensitivity in every domain. It was like conditioning yourself to have borderline personality disorder. To live in a world where people were transient, identity wasn’t fixed, even the smallest change in behaviour was significant, and the threat of abandonment hung over every interaction like the sword of Damocles.

The next big shift between us was phone calls.

The telephone was alive in a way text messages weren’t. If our shared diary offered a new frontier for intimacy—a new kind of companionship—this was closer than close, realer than real life. The calls would drag on for impossible lengths of time: two hours, then four, then six, then ten, falling asleep on the phone, feeling as though, through the phone line, we had made physical contact. Or something superior to physical contact: a doorway into the other person’s mind.

“I feel like we’re touching,” he told me once and then dozens of times afterward. “I can feel you here with me.”

“We’re meeting in the astral realm,” I offered.

It was like some occultic ritual—I felt him too. Our astral bodies knew each other, even if our physical ones didn’t. The physical world couldn’t offer this. Phones existed long before the internet, of course. But only the internet, where you got to know people backward, soul-first, could have brought us to this closeness.

The energy that had been stalking me since the summertime coursed through me. There was no more anxious static. There were no more mornings when I awoke grasping my own hand. I became a purpose-driven machine: I worked. My desire had been tamed—by the potential of something. Only no, it wasn’t “potential.” It wasn’t a stand-in; it wasn’t a promise of something more real. It was real.

More real than real. Everywhere I went, everything I did, I felt my virtual love there with me. I was inside his mind, and he was inside mine.

And then we started saying “I love you,” and then “I love you more”—until “I love you more” and “I love you so much my heart hurts” were all we were telling each other.

Over and over, I love you. It ruled every conversation. I meant it. I felt it. But I didn’t know if it was love.

I didn’t know what it was.

I’m not the first to have wondered about what was once called “computer love”—about whether it’s fair to call it love at all.

“What are the dangers of relying on a machine for a link to love?” Pamela Gerhardt asked in the Washington Post in 1999. “Can you love a person for, say, three years, as many people claim to have done, without knowing even his or her name? Is that love?”

Well, is it?

Sherry Turkle tells a story in her 1995 book Life on the Screen that, I think, answers Gerhardt’s question. It’s a story that has always haunted me, something anyone who has watched an episode of Catfish has seen happen in real time, even if they don’t realize what they’re watching unfold.

A couple falls in love online, and finally, after months of talking and, well, having cybersex, they decide to meet. Turkle writes of their encounter and their relationship leading up to it:

Peter’s story points to something predictable—even painstakingly obvious—to those who aren’t so chronically plugged in.

That “sixth sense” I described earlier, that ability to pick up something in the text that’s only being psychically communicated? It’s an illusion. It’s what Esther Gwinnell, author of the 1998 book Online Seductions, described to Gerhardt in that ’90s piece about internet romances: “Essentially, people are writing in their diaries. . . . They’re romancing themselves.”

When you find yourself in the grips of computer love, you find yourself, as I was, overwhelmed with questions. What is that space between two connected machines thousands of miles apart? Can love grow in that space? And if love is the right name for those emotions, who or what are we falling in love with? Is it love for another person? Is it a love of falling in love? A love of ourselves? Are we falling in love with a character of our own invention? (Was Dante in love with Beatrice? Was Petrarch in love with Laura?)

The truth is, though, there is no special magic at work when two people connect over the internet. Just the desire for something and the human ability to will that something into their field of vision.

The real magic is that sometimes, if you’re lucky, the illusion is shared.

One person’s magic, however, is another person’s curse.

Everything I’ve just said about mutual illusion flies in the face of every word of caution ever offered about online romances. Today, we warn people not to get too attached, because it’s not real. In the ’90s, the standard line was that online romances were fine as a type of imaginative play, so long as the boundaries between cyberspace and meatspace were respected.

In Life on the Screen, Turkle describes two early instances of catfishing, or at least digital romantic misconduct: first, a quasi-folktale that circulated in 1980s cyberspace about a woman posing as a man and leading other women on, and, second, a mysterious “Mr. X,” who “seduced and abandoned” several women on the WELL, a then-nascent virtual community.

Both are cautionary tales. But cautioning against what? As Turkle tells it, the problem wasn’t so much the deception, which in cyberspace wasn’t always an obstacle to a fulfilling interaction and could even be a useful tool for revealing “emotional truths.” The problem was confusing cyberspace and real life:

Other texts from the same period take a similar view, like Deborah Levine’s 1993 The Joy of Cybersex, which framed the open-endedness of virtual relationships with a sense of excitement. For her, it was a new frontier for our imagination, not a new way to be hurt in the world of sex and dating. And yet Levine can write blithely of the creative opportunities inherent in cybersex because, for her, cybersex existed only in cyberspace. It is a standalone activity, a hobby—ultimately, a novel form of masturbation. The boundaries are clearly delineated. If you foreclose on the possibility of desire for your partner outgrowing the confines of the screen, there’s safety.

If you treat the online world as a separate space (so the consensus went), and virtual people as somehow separate from the very real people “playing” them, then engaging in a type of role-playing—even a rather intense, emotionally charged one—is permissible. Maybe not everyone can compartmentalize as effectively, but they can at least be aware of the rules of the game up front.

Obviously, though, this takes on a very different valence in a world where the boundaries of cyberspace and meatspace are blurry, where our phones are extensions of ourselves, where we’re able to take our digital companions with us wherever we go. And where, perhaps most saliently, many of our physical-world relationships are trapped in prisons of mediation.

But the question remains: Can computer love ever be real, romantic love?

Can you fall in love with someone you know only through a screen? Especially today, when you can give so much more of yourself than you could in the ’80s or ’90s? And where do dating apps fall in the mix—is that another category of connection entirely? Are they proof that it’s all an illusion or a testament to the potential of digital connection?

Moira Weigel quotes Esther Gwinnell, the psychiatrist who wrote Online Seductions, in a piece for The Cut about the history of cybersex. These relationships, Gwinnell claims, were “uniquely intimate” because they “grew from the inside out. . . . The relationship is all about what is happening inside of the soul and the mind, and the body doesn’t get in the way.”

Could it be that online romances, under the right circumstances, represent not an inferior type of love but a purer expression of it? One abstracted from the physical body but with no less a foundation than one that began in the physical world?

I’ve always wondered: Is it possible to pair-bond during cybersex or sexting if both people are fully present? If the intention is shared, is it as real as the physical act itself? As if it’s an occult ritual, can you manifest one another, act through one another’s bodies? Could it even be more meaningful than sex where one party is emotionally or mentally checked out but physically there?

My online paramour would often remark on the surrealness of how, even though we’d never met each other face to face, he felt like he knew me—really knew me. And he felt like I really knew him—like I was the only person he’d ever been able to be himself with. We had never touched each other, but he was so struck by how much it felt like we had: the same rush of oxytocin, the same impulse to hold the other person close, the same attachment.

I had just as many memories with him as I had with physical-world friends—as I had with “real” boyfriends. If I was in the park by campus, sending him photos, it was as good as if he were sitting next to me. If he was driving with me on speakerphone, I might as well have been in the passenger seat.

And if we fell asleep talking, it was as good as falling asleep together.

One day, though, the highway between us slowed to a halt. The distance felt increasingly palpable, the screen representing an ever-thickening boundary. I got busy with school, and his life became increasingly stressful, causing him to withdraw from everything, including the digital world—including me.

I received “I love yous” every so often and very little else. Every now and then, we’d have a short, impersonal conversation—“what are you up to?” “reading”—that was somehow more painful to endure than a total absence of communication would have been. For the first time, what I felt was a yearning for something more with him, something more connected. But that closeness never rematerialized.

I wrote to him one day, in a bright blue text bubble, “I know you keep saying I love you, but what is love if all we have are texts and no physical body?”

And, just like that, it was over.

I heard from him a few more times, but, much like Peter’s experience as told by Sherry Turkle, the empathy, the sense of connection, was gone from the words. That strange ghost that had longed for a void to fill, an avatar to possess, had been exorcised from him.

Today, when people write about computer love—now, more often couched in terms of dating apps and the limbo of never-consummated talking stages—there is a broader acknowledgement that these things are wont to happen. It’s the nature of mediation. We even have a word for it: you pour yourself into someone; it feels real; then the other person ghosts.

There’s a part of me that remains unconvinced, though, that the screen is what truly separates us from one another. Somewhere, it seems, there’s something deeper than just mediation that forces all of us—like Dante seeking Beatrice—to wander through a world of ghosts.