Intimacy on the Internet: The Dilemmas, Limits, and Opportunities for Intimacy Online and Offline

Intimacy with another human being is one of the peak experiences of life. It is a wonderful feeling of closeness, which one can have with a spouse, lover, child, parent, brother, sister, friend, teammate, schoolmate, comrade in arms, co-editor, or colleague. The closeness can be physical, as between lovers, or intellectual as between psychohistorians developing a new paradigm. In this article I explore aspects of intimacy and how the experiences of intimacy are affected by online communication.