She broke up with me through email. Allison and I were 13 years old; we had made out consistently for a whole week, taking breaks for meals of course, and agreed to “try to make the distance work.” Two weeks after her summer vacation ended and she was back home, she said she couldn’t stand the distance, that maybe we should leave our options open, but she wanted to remain friends. And so, my first break-up came from my computer screen.

Now, ten years later, I read and re-read the email from the United States Center for Immigration Services, which announces that, after four months of waiting, my request for a visa for my fiancée, Ivona, has been approved.

I am definitely a product of the iGeneration; my cell phone is glued to one hand, my iPod to the other, and I was quite literally weened on a keyboard, according to my mother. I have had entire romantic relationships (with people I’ve known “in real life” beforehand) play out almost exclusively on AOL Instant Messenger. I think it’s fitting, therefore, that my first romantic trauma, as well as my greatest romantic triumph, have been revealed to me by the glow of a monitor, with the faint buzzing of processor fans to keep me company.

Iskra was the AIM girl. She and I had been in an English class together our freshman year, and I developed a crush pretty quickly. On the last day of class for the semester, I asked not for her phone number, but for her screen name.

We chatted briefly now and then and discovered we shared taste in music, and we both aspired to be writers. Nothing happened, as I lacked the courage to try to make fantasy into reality, and Iskra faded into the background, only to emerge now and then through chance sightings at the dining hall. I started dating someone else, and she transferred to a school closer to home in New York.

Iskra and I kept in touch, with a random instant message here and there. Once, between “on” sessions of my on-again-off-again with Elizabeth, I confessed I had had a crush on her, now that she was safely in another state and rejection would be a couple hundred miles away at least. It’s much easier to be brave when you can block the person if they say no.

To my surprise, she admitted the same, and over the course of sophomore winter break and many late-night IM conversations, a relationship started. We talked about everything, and occasionally actually called each other on the phone. The first time, I was taken aback and slightly embarrassed by the fact that I hadn’t heard her voice in a year and I had forgotten what it sounded like.

Still, we tried to make plans to meet. The lack of cars of our own, and money to travel with, made things difficult. I called her a minute before the ball dropped, and we lamented not being able to exchange a New Year’s kiss. Slowly, things slowed down and, quite frankly, I got bored with the iRelationship scene. We “broke up” when I finally realized that it didn’t feel like a real relationship. To this day, I haven’t seen Iskra since freshman year, despite efforts to make it happen for many months after it ended.

Every relationship I have been involved in has had a long-distance component to it. Part of that is from living on an island, and part of it is probably some latent naiveté; I always think it’s going to be easier than it turns out to be. Technology has been a necessary part of those relationships. I have had outrageous cell-phone bills as a result, I have browsed Facebook profiles and pictures for hours at a time, and Googled then-current and potential mates out of boredom, or curiosity, or in the hopes of discovering some interesting fact or embarrassing deal-breaker.

In our parents’ time, so I’m told, when the summer ended, so too did the summer relationship. Those who tried long-distance were subjected to, (gasp) writing actual letters and sending them from post offices (some of which are rumored to still exist, although for what purpose I am unsure).

The Facebook poke and MySpace comments have all but eliminated the need to have real-world flirting skills. Instead of buying your loved one a real gift, you need only spend a dollar or two on a picture that displays on their profile for all to see — limited edition gifts show you really care. People get married, and divorced, and have funerals in online video games, and eHarmony ads are all over television and the radio.

In today’s increasingly technological world, we’re falling in love with the illuminated pixels displaying Flickr photo pools and matchmaking websites, and with the sounds our email programs make when we have new mail. I, personally, check my cell phone obsessively in case I missed an important text message or voice mail.

The Internet has changed the way people meet and fall in love. The days of the shy guy getting up the nerve to approach the hopeful girl at the high school dance are long gone. Girls are just as likely to make a flirtatious Wall post as guys are to ask a girl out over instant messenger. And of course, before all this they can learn just about everything there is to know about the other person in their “About Me” section or through a Google search.

Whenever we need an update on our friends or lovers, we need only check their Facebook status or away message, and a relationship is only as real as Facebook says it is. Those who are unattached can be judged based on their “Interested in” and “Looking for” listings. Our friends are ranked by their placement in our Top 8, or Top 16, or whatever it is these days.

Currently, my fiancée is home in Bulgaria. We haven’t seen each other in person in four months, and it will be another three weeks or so before we meet again. When we first started dating, she insisted that I should call her, that it was the man’s job. Now, through voice-over-Internet programs, she calls my cell phone, for free, because it’s cheaper than me calling Sofia.

We have many aspects of a real relationship, despite the seven hour time difference. We play each other songs we like (or, rather, we send them to each other to play). We send each other pictures of family, of places we go. We email regularly, and we plan the wedding, debating over guest lists and catering prices, all with headsets on.

It’s not easy, although it’s easier for me than it is for her. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I’m able to ignore the bad parts and not get too hung up on the distance. It takes a certain degree of detachment to make a long-distance relationship work, unfortunately. This is not the first time we have been apart for months at a time, and it always takes a while to get back to the same level again. Having hundreds of pictures on my hard drive, of her, of vacations we’ve taken together, makes it better, but after I’ve pressed the power button on my PC, the bed is still conspicuously empty.

These days, with her gone, I can’t take her out to a restaurant or bar and be proud to be with the most beautiful girl in the room. Instead, I send friends whom I haven’t seen since I started dating her links to my photobucket account when they ask what she looks like. During an upcoming vacation she will take with her mother to Israel, we won’t talk, with actual voices, over the phone or Internet for 10 days. In a two year relationship, it will be the longest time we haven’t heard each others’ voices. With today’s technology, it makes perfect sense for her to be a quarter of the way around the world and for us to talk every day.

Technology has undoubtedly changed the landscape of love forever, at least in terms of how we find it and communicate it. What I have learned, though, is that it can’t be a replacement for love. Love today is still sought after ruthlessly, as evidenced by the fact that millions of people a year make profiles on social networking and dating sites. Entering “love” into Google brings up almost 2 billion results. There are how-to articles on every facet of it. Everyone can be an expert now.

That need for companionship is so human, so carnal, however, that machines can’t completely fill the role, in my opinion. But it can help find it.

Despite how we stumble upon it, I think the general idea has stayed the same. As society becomes more accepting of changing gender roles, as gay and lesbian rights are more widely championed and people are less persecuted for their personal relationships, I think love will become more “free,” in a liberated sense, than it ever has. And that change, in my mind, is a good one.

Soon, friends won’t say “you should meet my friend Jennifer, you’d really like her,” they’ll say “this creepy guy in my art history class poked me and I’m totally grossed out. I should Google him to see if he’s a sex offender or something.” And of course, they’ll say this to you in an instant message from thousands of miles away.