Getting Married by Theresa Alan

student too.” She ordered a latte for herself. “We have to look out for each other. I’m getting my PhD in sociology. How about you?”

    “MBA.”

    The kid behind the counter set the two lattes down. I took one and handed the girl the other.

    “I’m Gabrielle Leveska.”

    “I’m Eva Lockhart. It’s nice to meet you. I don’t have to be in class for another hour. Do you want to share a table with me?”

    “Sure.”

    We sat at a nearby table and I asked her what she was doing research on. She told me she was looking at the representation of self and social interaction in online gaming communities. Which meant nothing to me, and I said so.

    “Well, there are these games you can play online against thousands of other people from all over the world,” she explained. “You get to choose the character or persona you play these games with, and you can be male or female. The vast majority of people who play these games are men, yet many of the men choose female personas. Sometimes they’ll be given a hard time about that, but these guys will explain that they choose a female personality as a strategy because other male characters will give the female character gifts, like extra ammunition and supplies.”

    “Really? But don’t the people playing male characters know that the females are in all likelihood played by other men?”

    “Yeah, but it happens anyway. Characters even fall in love and get married online.”

    “I don’t get it. How do you get married online?”

    Gabrielle explained about online weddings where communities of characters met in cyberspace to have a ceremony and celebration. I’d had no idea such things happened, and I was fascinated to learn about this strange new world.

    We spent the next hour talking about gender and identity and how people socialize and don’t socialize with each other in an era of the Internet. It was so refreshing to talk about things other than business plans, economic forecasts, and the bottom line. I learned that Gabrielle was married. I told her that I was single and I was beginning to think I always would be.

    “What are you looking for in a guy?” she asked.

    “Someone who’s kind and funny. Someone who’s thoughtful and interesting.”

    “It’s interesting that you didn’t say anything about his looks.”

    That’s the tricky thing about befriending a sociologist. They’re always noticing that kind of thing.

    “Well, I don’t want him to look like an ogre, but attraction is such a tricky thing. I’ve dated some really good-looking guys who were boring as hell and I just didn’t care how chiseled their cheekbones were or how ripped their abs, I just can’t be attracted to someone who’s nothing more than a pretty face.”

    “Well, I know a guy I think you might like, and he’s pretty cute, too.”

    She invited me to join her and her husband, Dan, for a dinner where I’d meet Steve. It turned out Steve just didn’t do it for me, but Gabrielle and I kept calling and seeing each other. I didn’t get a boyfriend, but I did get a girlfriend.

    Her relationship with Dan was the first marriage I saw that I thought, wow, I want what they have . Most married couples I knew seemed bored and irritated with each other most of the time, like the spark had died a long time ago. I’d take years of bad dates before settling for something like that.

    But not Gabrielle and Dan. They’d been married for three years at that point and had been together two years before that, but they still were passionate about each other and they still really knew how to joke around and have fun together. They were both good about expressing their feelings. Several times I witnessed Gabrielle saying to Dan or Dan saying to Gabrielle something like, “When you said (or did)—————, it made me feel—————.” Then apologies and “you’re rights” and “I didn’t mean that at all. What I was trying to say was…” would flow. It was so much