The interface is simple, the procedure is compelling and the pickings are overblown. Despite the infinite division of chat identities into discrete areas, the interaction tends, as in life, to be informed by the desires to impress, have sex with and embarrass others. Even as one is happily disembodied, other users will demand your extrication from the virtual. It's a relief to locate friends and potential bonks who get your more arcane pleasures. Others I know have been similarly relieved and delighted to find that their proclivities, whether they be for French feminist poststructuralism, Italianate design or vegan barbecue, are shared.
Similar refinements are, often times, a potent aphrodisiac.
Online understandings can turn just as sour as their veritable counterparts, of course. And the interface, like all new technologies, enables the potential for novel derailment and disaster. Worse, they can just disappear altogether. I'm not the first person to observe the parallels between love and war. Remotecontrol romance, like the new war that has conquered space and the need for intimacy with the thing that its projectile will hit, allows for great daring and calamity.