Dating. Mating. Relating.

Everyone seems obsessed with relationships these days. When men and women share their relationship stories with me I see one big epidemic in our culture — fear of dependancy.

For instance, last night I was at a dinner party and when word got around that I am the Ph.D. who studies relationships, an inevitable mini group-therapy session broke out. The stories abounded about our curious relationship landscape. And alcohol-fueled questions popped out that amounted to “why am I like this?”

With few social rules forcing people into traditional relationships, many people are beginning to understand that their relationship style whether it be dominated by promiscuity, serial monogamy, an emotionally avoidant marriage, or preference for solitude, lies on them. With few family and friends forcing us into a legal, heterosexual, monogamous union, we are free to live out who we are. And that’s the problem. Many of us do not want to live out our “natural” attachment style and actually long for a closeness that will help us feel secure. Or we long for a relationship that will help us procreate and create healthy offspring.

Time and time again at these ad hoc therapy sessions, I find myself explaining “fear of dependancy.” Because, in my opinion, that’s what most relationship strife boils down to. In order to have a healthy relationship, we have to trust someone, we have to trust love and believe it will be consistent. And partners have to learn to depend on each other. All these beliefs about love are programmed in infancy and early life.

So when pop-psyche writers like myself identify someone as being comittment-phobic or a bad-boy or a cougar, we are actually looking at a behavior that is the outcome of a mistrust of love. A fear of being dependent on another.

For some reason, our culture places great value on independence. It’s one unfortunate downside of capitalism. My suspicion is that large, intertwined family systems are a threat to commerce and politics. But too much independence is a killer of romantic relationships. A healthy relationship is also not a kind of co-dependence where no one can remember who’s problem is whose. Instead, a mutually supportive relationship involves interdependence, where partners takes turns leaning on each other. And like that game of trust where one closes his eyes and falls back into the arms of a trusted friend, are you really convinced that you will always be caught? Because that’s exactly what’s keeping you single or disconnected in your marriage.

With the explosion of online connections, cyber introductions, and old-lover google searches, it seems that the whole world is in a digital love frenzy. But can text and email really grow a healthy love connection? The answer is a bit complicated: Sort of and No way.

First of all, what is a healthy love connection? I would say it is a relationship built on trust, honesty, and intellectual commitment. And it usually gets ignited by sexual passion.

The internet is certainly a great place to find sexual passion, since it takes barely a visual whiff or the promise of excitement and/or love, to trigger a sexy juice flow in most people. After all, arousal and orgasm are the sole domain of the individual psyches. We each have an individual pattern of arousal that is triggered by sight, smell, voice, and touch, all related to some early-life events that stimulated us. For instance, years ago I remember, one man examining my manicure closely on a first date. Months later, he shared a distinct memory that in middle school he had had a spontaneous erection at the exact moment that a teacher with a pretty french manicure placed a hand on his desk to emphasize a point during her lecture. In fear of being discovered, he stared at her hand while experiencing a confusing arousal. Even at the age of 35, this man was checking dates for pretty french manicures because the two events had now joined in his mind. While his story is a concrete example with a linear connection to his sexuality, most of us have a Picasso style of arousal, made up of bits and pieces of our memories. And online lovers are a great place to project those patterns, because no one is there in person to dispute the our fantasies.

But there lies the problem with Cyber Love. It is a dance with ourselves. It is a perfect place to imagine the perfect mate. Now, one nice thing about digital communication is that people who are a bit timid about revealing their most secret intimacies in person or via phone, find IM’s. Text, and Emails a safer place. On face value that is true, especially for men, who often have trouble verbalizing feelings. But the danger is two-fold. Text is also a boundary-free world where lovers often disclose too much too soon, before real trust is established. And that can set the relationship up for a pressured first-meeting. I mean, how terrifying to have so much emotional intimacy before one has even walked hand-in-hand with someone. The other serious danger with typed intimacies is that they become a document that can live forever, and what was once an innocent flirtatious remark can be used as a weapon later on.

So my big advice to would-be cyber lovers is to move to telephone chat long before too many secrets have leaked out onto your keyboard. Then when you feel safe, meet in public with friends around. If your relationship continues to grow, use text as an enhancement not as the primary communication. Love and intimacy must grow with eye contact, vocal tone, pheromones, and touch.