This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange Page A

dithering new dream chick. E-mail was the perfect contagion for an ideal defined by her physical and metaphysical absence. For the cohort coming of age just as intranets spread through college campuses, e-mail offered a new forum for an old romantic exercise. Inventing both one’s self and one’s ideal reader is the epistolary prerogative, and in e-mail’s first, great epistolary era, I was not alone in playing Edison at the keyboard.
    Especially in the early, sweaty stages of acquaintance, e-mail opened up a kind of perpetual empty stage, an endless call for encores. Though courtly protocols lingered into the age of digital woo, the distancing, disposable aspect of e-mail was also a kind of equalizer. In the unregulated realm of online communication, women didn’t worry in the same way about appearing too forward, too interested, too available. What was this back-and-forth anyway but a pixilated game? Private correspondence was soon confined to screens that homogenized the idiosyncrasies of text, temperament, and time into the rigid uniform of font, format, and instantaneousness. We learned to work around these deficits—explaining our moods, drafts, and deletions, and using space, ellipses, and emoticons to develop a grammar that might somehow mimic the intimacies of longhand.
    What remained—and will remain, as long as there is language between us—is the extent to which one could glean, between and beyond a lover’s words, a sense of what is being sought. It didn’t take long for young women still conducting intersex experiments to notice that the combination of constant availability and spectral absence had a kind of incentivizing effect. Long-distance relationships cropped up at awkward and often insurmountable coordinates, emotional infidelity was midwifed into the lexicon, and all around the world, certain girls were discovering that what uncertain young men often responded to—off-line too, but somehow more palpably on—was the perpetration of a dream girl whose allure was based in her being not quite there.
    This is not the elusive, untouchable quality—the presence —that writ the dream girls of old so large. This is the banal absence—of stability, of ambition, of selfhood, of sexual threat, of skirts that pass midthigh—now associated with the approachably edgy, adorably frantic, real-person-who’s-got-problems. Maybe it was a class-action-size case of codependency: though she reached the status of dream girl, she feels more like a fun-house reflection of millennial masculinity in crisis. Her widespread attraction suggests the extent to which she reflects a young man’s fears about finding a place in the world, much less figuring out the opposite sex. Like a girly mini-me, she follows in the proverbial hipster dude’s shadow, filling his ear with life-coaching tips or just adorable chatter, skipping behind him on the path to mutually assured regression. In the movies, the new version of a happy ending for these stunted young men is not marriage or more than a provisional suggestion of romance. Instead the stories revel in the bittersweetness of edging a reluctant boy into manhood, whether his twittery comrade merely disappears at the end or indeed dies trying to get him there.
    Often, as with Portman in Garden State , Charlize Theron in Sweet November (2001, RIP), and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), avatars of this ideal attach themselves to the mixed-up young man with blithe aggression. They forge rehabilitation programs, scatter aphorisms (“Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room” and “I’m impossible to forget but hard to remember” are two from the latter), and declare faux-obscure cultural allegiances that feel written in a particular way: they reek of the self-conscious blather of wee-hour e-mails, the personality-as-taxonomy rubric of online profiles, the ideal as an unending feedback