Technology and Intimacy in Japanese Relationships
I was with a Japanese friend at a coffee shop one afternoon, and we overheard two Japanese women talking at the next table. One of them sounded really angry. I couldn’t quite understand everything she was saying, so I asked the girl I was with to translate. It turns out that the woman had recently broken up with her boyfriend because he spent more time with his cell phone than with her – even while they were on dates! His sex life was satisfied by porn – like many Japanese men, this woman’s ex-boyfriend was getting his sexual fulfillment almost exclusively from porn through manga, the Web and adult videos.
On my way back home I couldn’t help but wonder… is technology replacing sex and intimacy in Japanese relationships? These days, I often get the feeling that a lot of Japanese people have better relationships with their toys—computers, cell phones, Wii, iPhones, etc.—than they have with people.
It seems like in modern Japanese society, people talk to each other more through computers or cell phones than face to face.
With instant messaging and texting becoming the primary mode of communication, are single Japanese women being forced into dating men exclusively through their computers or cell phones?
Online dating is a really good thing – for men and women. In some ways, online dating has a special appeal for women, because by writing back and forth and sharing information, women are able to build an emotional connection with the men they meet – the emotional part of the relationship starts there, with the words. So by the time the woman and the man actually meet in person, the woman is already involved in the relationship.
Men relate to technology differently with regards to dating. For men, online dating is more of a numbers game – it’s a way to quickly meet lots of different women and see if we’re interested. The emotional connection for a man usually comes later in the process. Most men want to make sure that they are physically attracted to a woman before they get emotionally involved – if a man meets a woman that he has only chatted with online, and he discovers that he is not physically attracted to her when they meet face to face, he is not going to pursue the relationship with her. In fact, some less tactful guys might even grab their cell phones and vanish, leaving the woman confused and angry.
While it’s true that women might prefer some aspects of online dating – at least as a way to make an initial introduction – most women do not want to have their dating lives contained exclusively within the realm of cell phones and computers.
Women want intimacy, close contact, trust and warmth; they don’t want a relationship to end through a text message. (Of course if the man does not have the courage to end a relationship face-to-face, he probably was not worth being with anyway, but that is not the point.)
There are women who are afraid of commitment or who are reluctant to get into a “real” relationship – and that type of casual, technology-centered relationship would work fine. There’s no commitment, you don’t have to get dressed up, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time drinking Manhattans just to get through a horrible face-to-face date with a man who turns out to be a jerk, or worse.
I am sure that the people who invented the Internet or cell phones did not mean for them to be as used the way people are using them today. The Internet was never intended to replace intimacy in human relationships. And I am sure that the people who invented cell phones never imagined that people would one day use them to satisfy their sexual desires by viewing pornography.
Maybe as people we need to be more aware of how we use our computers and cell phones to communicate with other people. We should make an effort to see our friends and lovers face-to-face instead of talking to them through a cold, hard, piece of plastic.
Has technology ever been a problem for your dating relationships with Japanese women?
Have you ever had to limit your use of technology to save a relationship with a woman?
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