Love and Lust on the Internet

This isn’t a town that celebrates long-term relationships.

We are more Hollywood than Omaha in the evaluation of romantic forevers, falling in and out of love like wart hogs in the rutting season. Eternity is anything that lasts past the weekend.

Almost 50,000 divorces are filed each year in L.A. County, and that doesn’t count the number of couples who live together only until the glow wears off.

Much of this, I suppose, is due to a blurred vision of exactly what forever is and what it takes to cling to a dream once reality starts creeping in.

I mention this today because friends have been divorcing, and their reasons have all seemed pretty bizarre, not unlike that of the Indiana woman who shot herself in the foot to cure a bunion.

Love faded in one case because the man insisted that their wolfhound sleep with them every night, regardless of what else might be going on in bed. The wife challenged him to choose either her or the dog. He chose the dog.

Two couples I know parted due to third-party intrusions, which is always a problem in a culture that values youth and a good body over the more mundane assets of loyalty and responsibility.

But what has really stunned me is the erosion of a marriage between people I’ve known for years because she’s romantically involved with a man she’s never physically met. They interfaced on the Internet.

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I heard it from the husband, call him Ernie, who has always been the perfect embodiment of contentment. Until now, he dwelt in a kind of cartoon world where birds sang, flowers talked and the sun wore a happy have-a-nice-day face.

Ernie figured that the key to a good marriage was to spend as much time with one’s mate as humanly possible.

As a result, he and his wife of 10 years, call her Leona, were never apart. They worked together, traveled together, shopped together, showered together, ran together and generally behaved as though they were joined at the soul.

When Leona got into computers, Ernie followed, and eventually they ended up with twin AST468s in the same room, exchanging messages on the Internet. They were together even in cyberspace.

Then one day, as he told it to me over lunch, Ernie began noticing that Leona was behaving in a peculiar manner.

It wasn’t just that she preferred being alone in the bathroom or that she was beginning to fuss over Ernie’s choice of running routes. She also was spending more time at the computer and not messaging him as much.

One evening he tried looking over her shoulder and she instantly turned off the machine. In another instance, before she elbowed him away, he caught the end of a computer message from someone Leona refused to discuss.

When Ernie pressed the issue, she finally admitted she had fallen in love with a man in Wisconsin. They were sharing spirits in cyberspace.

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This is not a case of callow youths being lured into sexual slavery by the wiles of a Machiavellian hacker. Leona is in her mid-30s and Ernie 10 years older, and to all outward appearances they were deeply in love.

But somehow, as she cruised through the net, Leona met a man I’ll call hipguy.withline@aol.com who dazzled her with sweet bytes at the keyboard much as the Rhine maidens dazzled Siegfried with sweet music in “Gotterdammerung.”

Unknown to poor Ernie, their correspondence, which began innocently enough, soon turned to tales of marital discord and eventually to lust.

Ernie found copies of messages Leona had exchanged with hipguy.withline@aol.com and they appalled him. “They were filth!” he said, wearing the kind of sad and incredulous expression Mickey might wear if he found Minnie in the sack with Goofy.

Ernie’s point was that if Leona wanted filth, they should have performed filthy acts together, but as it turned out that was one of Leona’s gripes. She was tired of doing everything together.

Freedom and independence was what she had in mind, and hipguy was offering her just that, the way phone sex offers erotica without involvement.

Leona represents to me the direction in which we’re traveling, toward a world dominated by the kind of extrinsic relationships that are protected by electronic distances and require no personal commitments.

I don’t blame her in a way. Living in Ernie’s Cartoonville must be something of a trial, but if she leaves him for a voice in the cold darkness of cyberspace, I’ll bet she’ll someday long for the touch of a human hand.

I’ll bet someday we all will.

Al Martinez can be reached via e-mail at Al.Martinez@latimes.com.