There are some pretty big differences between me and my girlfriend. She is from Aotearoa, I’m from Queensland. She is 10 years younger than me. She loves Marmite and loathes Vegemite; I hold the reverse and correct opinion.
But probably our biggest difference is in our attitude to the internet. We are in what is called an offline/online gap relationship. She hates her phone so much. She treats it like a sometimes food, often has no idea where it is and, when she does have it, it’s not charged and has a haunted aura. In her dream world she wouldn’t have to own a phone and could just communicate via telepathy or little birds and woodland creatures passing occasional messages. Often her loved ones get in touch with her via me, and I often am messaging friends she is with to get a message to her.
Her relationship to her phone is even more extreme in comparison with mine. I treat my phone as though it’s been soldered to my hand in some sort of terrible but fortunate accident. It is my miracle infant that I love playing with for hours and hours.
I am almost always texting a group chat or tweeting something. I love knowing the breaking news, the pop culture gossip, what people are saying about … everything, the niche jokes that you only get if you spend too much time online finding out about things that definitely don’t concern you. I am not bragging about this or saying it’s good or normal for the human brain – but it’s me. I contain multitudes, and they are all on my phone.
My girlfriend is unburdened by the discourse of the day, preferring to have her own busy interior life. She has read 57 books this year, whereas I have watched all of Selling Sunset and read countless posts about a wide variety of topics (it counts!). She brings me talk of what she’s reading, what she’s thinking, her layered emotional experience with a particular kind of paper or her new favourite pen. I bring her a story of a weird man who went viral for looking like Willy Wonka (or something). She talks about the next thing she’s making with her hands, I tell her annoying movie news and which couples have broken up. I don’t sit her down for a daily briefing, it mostly just comes up when I reference something I assume she knows about because it’s been all over the entire internet for weeks – and she looks at me with a blank face.
Sometimes I do mention something on purpose. But I have a scale. For some things there is simply too much context to explain, as happened a few nights ago.
I was online as all the buzz kicked off about the Vanity Fair journalist Olivia Nuzzi. If you are another offline person, Nuzzi’s ex-boyfriend published a piece that included poems he claimed were written to her by Robert F Kennedy Jr, after claims that they had an inappropriate relationship when she profiled RFK Jr for the magazine. One thing led to another in a group chat, and obviously I had to send a voice memo impression of RFK Jr saying: “I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you.”
My girlfriend was in another room not engaging in the world (crafting) and I didn’t think she could hear me. But out of the blue I heard her say, “What … are you doing?” I paused, opened my mouth, but there was just too much to explain. I knew she would never have heard the name Olivia Nuzzi, so I would have to go back several steps. Instead I just said, “Don’t worry about it.” She said OK and went happily back to what she was doing, unbothered by not knowing.
I think our dynamic is good for us. The important thing is that we listen to each other, and enjoy it. I love how emotional she gets about books, how she connects to the characters, how she looks as though she is in a 4D cinema chair when a book is heating up. And I think she likes getting updates from the online world, the pop culture world, through me, a beautiful conduit. It’s also a helpful reminder for me – when I start explaining some of this out loud – that none of it really matters.
She’s very offline, I’m too online and, somewhere between those two extremes, we’ve built a life that makes sense.
Rebecca Shaw is a Guardian Australia columnist
