Romance at First Click? Ha.

"Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!"

-- Jane Austen, from "Emma" (1816)

I woke up that Monday morning feeling pretty good about the way things were going between us. I should have taken the fact that he begged off my offer to let him walk me home Saturday night as a sign, but I suppose hindsight is always 20/20. With Houseparties -- Princeton University's annual three-day rite of dresses, dancing and debauchery -- on the horizon, I wanted to test whether Victor, the freshman I had been flirting with, was date-worthy material. So shunning the phone, the short walk to his dorm and the trusty postal service, I figured -- naively -- that a quick e-mail could help clarify the situation. I wrote:

hey just saying hi since i rarely get to talk to you unless i am wearing some ridiculous costume and we're both a few beers deep. apparently we still have to go to class at this school instead of just going on epic drinking adventures so i've got to run. but im me sometime -- runaround0. . . .

talk to you later amy

I was hoping he would take the hint and "im" -- instant message me. Later that afternoon, my heart quickened when I found this reply in my inbox:

My instant messenger name is [deleted] but I gave it up for Lent and haven't signed on since. I'm contemplating whether to return or not because I feel like I used to waste my life away on it . . . we'll see.

Laters-Vic

Flabbergasted, but eager to keep our virtual conversation going, I could muster only a short e-mail response:

no im? good god man, how do you communicate with the outside world?!?

That question pretty much says it all -- instant messaging, known simply as IM, is the communication lifeline of today's college student. Dialogue with my peers has been reduced to uncapitalized, unpunctuated and misspelled one-liners in HTML format. Even the most personal conversations now occur without human contact. What once required bumping into someone in person and making that initial painful small talk can now be done from the safety of a keyboard in simple text messages that do not unintentionally betray any disappointment or hurt.

In this new realm of faceless interfacing, there's e-mail, which is quick and informal, and then there's IM, which is immediate and ubiquitous. But when it comes to romance on the Internet, informality and immediacy give way to caution and prudence. My friends and I fret over these messages, sometimes even sending them to each other for editing, so that by the time they are sent "instantly," they have been crafted and honed, like a political campaign message. In sending my message to Victor, I broke a cardinal rule -- in romance, never type in haste.

The rules of virtual conversation and courtship are no more simple or well defined than they were in Jane Austen's world. Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet would have felt at home with cybertalk, and could have warned against my hasty indiscretion. Though often seen as removing inhibitions, the Internet only transposes them. Old conventions are replaced with new ones. No matter how many ways to communicate we find, it's still hard to communicate.

One of the new conventions is that an e-mail carries more weight than a casual IM conversation. For those who have missed this generational phenomenon, Internet services such as AOL Instant Messenger enable you to have multiple real-time conversations with friends. Each person has an online identity, known as a screen name. Whenever people are online, their screen names appear on your buddy list, a log of all your friends who are available to chat at that moment. But without Victor's screen name, I had been forced to e-mail him, in flagrant defiance of the rules of virtual flirting, which I had generally adhered to since arriving here from Milwaukee two years ago. Now I wasn't sure how to interpret my exchange with Victor, so I turned to my friends for an evaluation.