90's AOL Chat Rooms and the Desire to be Desired

Nothing really changes. Everything just accelerates.

Photo by Nicolò Canu on Unsplash

When I was 14 or maybe 15, I had this terrible habit of going on AOL (modem sounds) and joining chat rooms and asking a/s/l to meet girls my age to chat with. We’d share messages over AIM (I think my AIM handle was something like ZeroBoy, just to give you a sense of how things were going at the time). I’d chat up three or four girls at a time. Never starting a relationship with them or confessing love or anything like that. But flirting and sharing teenage life stuff. A couple of them exchanged home addresses with me and sent me letters, which made me feel awkward. One sent me a glittery letter which clearly expressed strong emotions that I was not ready for. Another girl sent me a photo of herself and she was gorgeous, so gorgeous she was actually Neve Campbell. I still don’t know if it was actually Neve Campbell or just an insecure 14-year-old girl who wanted more than anything to be beautiful like Campbell and thought she could fool me. Probably the latter. Which still makes me sad.

I remember chatting with these girls and then getting offline and feeling so lonely and empty and desperate for connection, so insecure. And those letters only made me feel guilty. They still do. I hope those girls all are doing well.

Some of this is normal healthy teenage awkwardness. You’re trying to figure out how you might be interesting to the opposite sex and how they might be interesting to you. You’re learning what it means to flirt and talk to them. And all of that is goofy and a little strange. But I don’t think what I did was innocent or healthy or good. Maybe at its core it was normal, but in practice, that technology made it far too easy to attach and connect and unknowingly lead along innocent girls. It only aggravated my desire to be really known and desired. And it only gave me an artificial substitute, one which was highly addictive. Thankfully, there were almost no images in these chat rooms or on AIM, that I saw. So things kept (relatively) clean.

I’ve said before that around this same time that I had a crush on a girl whose house I used to ride my bike in front of regularly, hoping to get a glimpse of her. And before that I used to look in the pages of a church photo directory at a family photo which included an image of a girl I had a crush on when I was even younger.

All of which to say, my youth included all these moments of desperation to be desired and to desire and to obsessively look at girls I had a crushes on (not even in a sexual way, to be clear!). And I was held back by technology, thankfully. I had to resort to bike rides and church photo directories.

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is that I don’t think anything of substance has changed, but I do think the intensity has dramatically changed, and therefore the stakes have changed. Teens are still meeting and chatting online, but they are doing so on video or with pictures, some of which may be digitally altered to hide their real physical appearance through A.I. Teens still long to be known and desired and attended to, but now there are a billion tools to promote themselves and expose themselves, and the competition to be known seems impossibly high. Teens still share pictures of themselves, but now they are explicit. Teens still obsessively pore over images of their crushes, but now it doesn’t just happen in their minds, it happens on Instagram. And teens still come away from these exchanges feeling inadequate, depressed, guilty, ashamed, and lonely.

Again, I think at root of all this was a set of healthy, normal desires. A desire to be known. A desire to learn how to interact with the opposite sex. A desire to be attractive and interesting to the opposite sex. And a desire to not be alone. I think for any teenager about to move into adulthood, these are reasonable desires if they are rightly ordered with higher desires.

But the technology fed on those desires and inflamed them so that they overwhelmed me, as I think they now dramatically overwhelm most young people today. It whispered to me that I could fulfill all my desires now if I only set aside other, more important issues in life, ignored my other responsibilities. In a word, it offered me addiction to the possibility to fulfillment of adolescent longing. It touched on my insecurities and fears and offered a cheap and easy way out, which never worked.

My fear is that none of this has changed, it has only accelerated. That the same tools that seduced me to waste hours chatting with girls online, desperately trying to find some connection, risking exposure and sin have only become massive, massive markets and social norms. And our children our suffering accordingly.

It seems to me that young people need newer, or maybe older, ways of engaging with the opposite sex that don’t involve obsessive, metric-based, digital connections. They need the freedom to talk, to hang out, to play, to befriend, to flirt, to learn to be themselves without fear of surveillance and exposure. I feel blessed being born just early enough to taste the Internet revolution but dating and getting married before social media took over the universe. My kids don’t get that experience, but I can give them as much of it as possible by keeping them off social media and not letting them own a smartphone.

If we want our kids to be free to explore these healthy, normal experiences without the seductive and addictive forces of technology, then we have to fight for them. They are worth it. Already many teenagers are turning to A.I. for companionship, signaling a fear of ever reaching out to the opposite sex to expressing themselves in healthy ways. I expect that trend only to continue. If we want to stop the trend, then we need to open our homes to our kids and their friends, invite them to hang out together, allow them to take risks riding around the neighborhood, allow them to be kids, in other words.

But most of all, we need to teach our teenagers where their desire to be desired will always ultimately be fulfilled, in Christ. They probably won’t hear this easily in the moment, I know I didn’t as a teen, but they need to hear it anyway. The one who truly affirms, desires, and attends to them as special and worthy and wonderful is the God who created and sustains them. And that is the only place they will find true fulfillment. While it’s a good thing to desire the desire of a spouse (or a friend for that matter) that human desire is only a faint echo of God’s greater and more essential desire for us, which will never fail or leave us. Where we may have to trick humans to obtain their favor, like sending images of movie stars instead of images of ourselves, we can always present our real image to God, because he knows it anyway and he loves us anyway.