
Nightflower Reports on the Reality of Virtual Love & Relationships for NWN
When I first embraced Second Life as my recreational escape, I jumped in with such reckless passion and abandon that it sent my whole world teetering out of control. Sadly, my experience was far from unique. The virtual world is rife with stories of the emotional wounds and relational carnage that result when the Second Life/Real Life balance gets out of whack. But having fought my way back from the brink, I see now that Second Life is not the problem. While the virtual world is an undeniably magnetic place, it’s ultimately the personal baggage, unmet needs, and coping skills we bring to it that determine whether we thrive, or...um, nosedive. So from the hard-won lessons learned by residents from all over the grid, here are five keys to living a balanced life for those with a foot in each world.
1. Don’t Romanticize Your Relationship with your Avatar
I love my avatar Night, and enjoy alternating between talking about her as if she were me, and referring to her as if she were a unique, sentient being. While there are some valuable kernels of truth in that viewpoint for a discussion on identity, that kind of talk is potentially destructive hogwash if we’re talking about balance. In a literal sense, Night and I are not two people with two lives. I am one woman, choosing to invest a portion of my finite resources of time, money, headspace, and emotional bandwidth by meeting with real people in a pretend world. As much as I love to passionately soliloquize about the transcendent, eternal qualities of our virtual selves, my emotional health also requires me to reject romanticization, and embrace the truth that my flesh-and-blood self is inherently more valuable than my digital projection.