Friends, I blog to you today about grave matters. As you can see by the title of this post, I have decided that the moniker “Fear and Loathing on the Internet” is just not quite strong enough for the subject I am about to broach. It is more base and inhuman than the most sinister war crime, more dark and terrifying than the deepest nightmare, more violent and senseless than an Aztec human sacrifice. What I want to blog about today is romantic relationships between humans. In the context of the Internet, of course.

You see, the Internet has changed them forever, and I firmly believe it’s for the worse, not the better. Looking back on my life, I’m rather ashamed to say that upon reflection, a lot of the big, dramatic, and frankly bad romantic moments didn’t take place through tearful broken voices shouting at each other in a storm that was the very metaphor for our chaotic relationship, but rather across cables or wires or whatever manner of dark voodoo science that makes the Internet work. I have never moaned goodbye to my eternal love while we floated on a piece of driftwood in the North Atlantic, only to let them plunge to their icy death. Instead I…….um….turned on Caps Lock and….hit the keys harder than…usual?

On top of that, the dawn of the NWO of social networks has given me powers that I absolutely should not have. I’m not Spider Man. I have no wise old men to counsel me to exercise great responsibility, only old Japanese men who stare at me angrily on the train for no reason(I don’t know why, we both seem to enjoy lemon chu-his). I’m not capable of handling the power of having access to every minutiae of my romantic interests’ existence. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I “use this power for evil” that would at least be cool. Instead I use it like a moron, getting caught up in day-to-day events instead of viewing things in the proper context.

The people of my parents’ generation didn’t have this problem. They would either be fortunate enough to be in a situation where they were with their person of interest all the time, or they saw them very infrequently. In the second case, they viewed things in the proper context, they watched people gradually change over time, which is a far more accurate reflection of reality.

It’s far too late in the game to change anything about it, I think, but maybe I’m just an idiot and everybody else handles this problem adroitly. But based on the amount of breakups I see over Facebook, I think not.