Long-distance love. Is that possible? Poetry, music and literature have been asking for generations. Our daily lives depend on the answer to this question, now more than ever. In fact, how many people are experiencing long-distance love in the days of the coronavirus? Every day I read stories of people who fell in love with someone they have never meet, only by chatting on social media. Locked up in our homes we dream of love and unlocking the door someone might enter. Whether it’s the girl you casually chat with on Facebook or the guy met on tinder, your heart doesn’t stop beating by decree. Actually.
“It is by separating when you feel and understand the strength with which you love” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky. Yet many think it is something unheard of and unthinkable. But we should remembered that this has been happening since the beginning of internet. At the beginning there was ICQ, then Myspace, then Facebook, Instagram and all the other social networks. Containers of stories that are born first in the head than in the flesh. And what about Meetic, Tinder, Badoo, Lovoo and all the endless array of virtual moments of love meeting? If all this yesterday was aimed at an audience that is still growing but limited today, quarantine has made this type of approach normal.
This is nothing new
There is nothing strange about it. If we think that the first marriage announcement of the modern era dates back to 1685 on a British agriculture newspaper, why shouldn’t we use the internet? And I remember that “There is mail for you”, one of the first movie to tell about love in chat, dates back to 1998. We’ve got the time to get used to it. If long-distance love didn’t exist, Pablo Neruda could never have writte: “one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.” Despite all the limits that virtual meeting will always have, distance is no longer an excuse. What can we expect? When quarantine will be over and we will then no longer be obliged to stay two meters away by decree, 2021 will be the year of human history with explosive population growth.
#Italyintheheart
