Wordcount

Since the first love letter was posted, countless romances have been conducted through written correspondence. Indeed, every medium of communication has probably been used at some point by lovers to speak through a distance to each other, but love letters hold a special place in the practice of romance. The lovely thing about writing to a lover is that a love letter can be carried about on the person, to be read and re-read when one needs some form of affirmation or reminder. So it is not a surprise that among the personal effects of many soldiers carried out into the frontlines are letters from family and lovers back home, and that much writing goes on while they're dug in, waiting in the trenches for action.

Email and online messaging through the Internet have expectedly also been co-opted by pining people around the world to stay in touch with their loved ones with even more immediacy than before, though personally I feel that something might be lost in such instantaneous communication. Both the amorous arts of conversation and of letter-writing suffer: being able to converse at any hour at seemingly any distance makes us treasure the moments of actual conversation less, while the 'live' nature of a chat is antipathic to the considered reflection and extended modulation of a letter.

But online romance does suggest a radical and interesting experiment that could shed some light on philosophical musings about what love is all about and how love develops between two people. A growing number of people have met online and had their relationships mature into something akin to our offline notion of romantic love (and for all intents and purposes is the same thing save for being carried out online). Once in a while the newspapers do report on couples living in different continents who met online and finally agreed to meet in person and marry. While these dramatic stories play on our sense of disjunction between the close online intimacy and the long physical separation, cases where the two people aren't complete strangers in the offline world (friends of friends and so on) and who live in the same region must be more common and an increasing means of partnership.

The important thing for this proposed study is that these relationships begin online and continue online until the point where the two parties think it is something like love. Why is this important? Consider that most instant-messaging programs enable chat loggnig, so all that has been said will be recorded down as a computer file, and that emails can be saved virtually forever. Therefore, every single word that has gone on between this online couple from the time they met has been recorded! And assuming that they only communicated online and not talked on the phone or met in person, which is quite likely if they live far apart and telephony or travel are prohibitively expensive, then we have a record of the entire extent of communication between the couple! So, simply put, we can count the exact number of words that are needed to pass between two people for them to fall in love. Not only that, we can go over every single conversation and track the alternating periods of drifting apart and drawing closer that oscillate in every relationship and watch how the incidences of drawing closer become increasingly preponderant. We can replay the instances where misunderstandings were cleared up and one party gains insight into the other's mind and soul. We can learn if the circumstances of the very first conversation and how it turned out have any bearing on the final outcome ("if you thought he was a jerk the first time you chatted, why did you still continue to say hello when he came online?").

So there you have it: an exciting new experiment in human psychology with important consequences for how we view and depict love in our assumptions and in our communications. Interested volunteers can send me their word counts at the usual address.