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Prem Panicker

For the life of me, I can't remember which of us first used the 'L' word!" he told me.

"All I remember is, suddenly we were saying 'I love you' to each other about 19 to the dozen -- and then, as suddenly, we both pulled up short and said, hello, where're we going here?

"So we stopped short, right in the middle of the umpteenth exchange of 'I love you' and decided to find out where we were coming from.

"I told her that, though I am young and reasonably okay-looking, I had never settled into a real time romance -- or, rather, hadn't tried again after the first attempt went bust. That I was very, very committed to my career, that I tended to work 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week and was loving it, loving the challenge and the excitement of it all. I didn't think it was fair to get into a marriage-type situation when I wasn't sure I would be able to find time for my wife.

"I also told her that though work was a huge turn on, I had, of late, found a part of me getting increasingly lonely. Wanting to reach out. Wanting companionship and love. That, increasingly, I was finding it from her and being able to be with her even as I worked had solved, for me, the problem I faced with real time romance. And that with her as my love, I felt totally rounded and complete, where earlier there was a void...

"I also told her that if we did agree to be a cyber-couple, I couldn't promise to be with her all the time -- after all, she was housebound, and had tons of time. I, for my part, had the demands of my work, but that I would most faithfully promise that I would make every effort to find time to be with her every day and that, when I was with her, I would ensure that both of us got to get the full benefit of our togetherness. And also that, no matter what was going on with me at work, if she needed me because she was hurt or upset or whatever, she could page me at once and I would drop everything and be there with her."

"I told him how, all my life, people had taken me up when it suited them and thrown me aside when it suited them. How I had spent a lifetime feeling disposable, unwanted for my own sake, how my self-esteem was at its very lowest ebb.

"I told him how I was used to being there for people when they needed me and how, whenever I was hurting, I would see people vanish. How the fact that he had not only spent hours that day listening to me, but had taken the trouble to seek me out the next day, ask me how I was coping and been there for me again, was a first for me.

"I told him that, from him, I was for the first time getting unquestioned love, support, sympathy. He was, when I needed it, a handkerchief to weep into, a shoulder to lay my head on, a pillar, maybe, to rest my load against for a while when the strain of carrying it began getting to me. And that, for this reason above all, I felt my heart full when I thought of him... and that I guessed, when I told him I love him, this is what I meant!

"And we discussed, too, the fact that in all probability, we would never meet in real life. And we both agreed that just finding each other and being able to give each other so much, to contribute to each other's well-being as much as we found we were doing, was gift enough for now. And that we would not, like the monkey in the fable, grasp for too much and end up with our paw caught in the cookie jar.

"I guess that was when we dropped the last of our inhibitions and ventured into the area of cybersex... or, at least, making love to, with, each other is the way I would prefer to describe it."

"Ah, yes, 'cybersex'!" the groom 'sighed', when I asked him about it. "You know, in my early days, I wandered into a chat site called Bianca's Smut Shack. And found supposedly sane people spewing the kind of stuff that even third-rate pornographers would scorn to touch. And I was, like, what the heck does anyone get out of this crap?

"Came the day we figured we were in love and, suddenly, it was, like, I was consumed by an intense desire to take her in my arms, to touch, to hold, to love with our bodies as we already did with our minds and hearts.

"Don't ask me where this kind of ability comes from, I still can't figure it out myself. I guess, it's like, when you make love in real time for the first time, genetic knowledge, instinct, everything somehow combines to guide you. I guess something of the sort explains how it worked for us. But, basically, I found myself writing as fast as I could type, spinning, for her, a fantasy. First, describing my home as I 'led' her through it, to my bedroom, setting a mood, dimming the lights, lighting incense sticks, turning on the music and, there on, to the physical, forgetting the crude mechanics of the actual act of lovemaking and concentrating instead on a sensuous seduction of the mind -- a mutual one, actually, as she picked up on my thoughts and images and elaborated on them and then I picked up the thread and...

"An hour, maybe more, later, both of us were -- in a physical sense, perhaps -- 'unfulfilled'. Or, not to mince words, neither of us had experienced, real time, the big 'O'. But mentally, emotionally, we were as drained, as satisfied, as happy and tingly all over, as we would have been in the aftershock of the most satisfyingly passionate real life encounter.

"Is this right? Or wrong? Kinky?

"I know these questions will be there in your mind and in the minds of anyone I talk to about this. All I can say is, we are, in every sense, a real couple. And there is as much of the sexual in our relationship as there is of conversation, of sharing. We both find it fulfilling, satisfying. Neither of us, after over a month-and-a-half of being together, feel the least ill effects. What we have, what we share, what we do, is between two consenting adults. It gives us so much and doesn't hurt any other person, so who's to say it is wrong?"

Illustration: Pramod                                                                More