On a chilly February evening in 2019, a date I had met only hours ago earlier introduced me to the Museum of Broken Relationships. It was a recommendation, tailored to our conversation, and it registered within me like an imprint. I checked the website the next day, fascinated by all of the objects attached to their stories – of failed and lost relationships. I remember sharing it with much excitement with my friends. Over the years, I have visited the site frequently to check for new entries. Last year, when my dearest friend went on a solo trip to Zagreb, she texted me that her next stop was to the museum I had told her about all those years ago. She sent me photos of the displays along with their stories, she got me a souvenir, and I finally got to experience it vicariously through her.
A date I don’t speak to any longer, a friend who carried a memory of my excitement all these years, and a museum that is dedicated to the fragility of human connections – space to grieve the losses our society rarely makes room for – and for it all to be threaded together digitally. A connection made online, a website visited, and photos shared on WhatsApp – digital intimacy is not always obvious or visible, but a lingering trace.
The internet has completely changed how we think and do connections and intimacy. At the moment, the idea of it varies, depending on whom you ask. For the older generation reconnecting with lost friends, it demands an adjustment to not just the digital interface but the new grammar of connection that comes with it. There is a moment in Lizzy Stewart’s graphic novel Alison that illustrates a tender conversation between the eponymous protagonist and her friend, Tessa, attempting to recall a memory from the late eighties. Tessa confesses that memory has always evaded her, especially of the “nice stuff” that happens and then fades. Alison responds that she remembers all because she felt it would go away; she had to “ bank it all. Really store it all up. Just in case there was no more.” Two years ago on my birthday, a friend gifted me a copy of this book I’d long wanted to read. She later told me that she chose it from my want-to-read list on Goodreads. Such instances make me appreciate the convenience of the digital world we inhabit, for allowing us to announce our quiet presence and attention in our relationships, despite the distance and messiness of adult life.
As for us who grew up with the many versions of the internet, we adapted alongside continually evolving ideas of safe connection, real intimacy and the language required to pursue these relationships. At the core of it, intimacy has always been a feeling of closeness, trust, safety and belonging. With every new facet of the internet, we collectively found ways to define and validate its intensities, proximities and accessibilities – from accepting friend requests, liking people’s relationship statuses on Facebook, entering anonymous chatrooms, joining dating apps to explore love-lust, to soft launching people on stories – we have been editing the frames and forms in which we connect.
In the last ten years, dating apps have been both a space for exploration and an escape from boredom. They brought about a cultural shift from the ideas of dating to marry, created a new language in which we like, lust, love and all the in-betweens. Vishnupriya Das’s work on exploring the infrastructure of a local dating app, TrulyMadly, reveals some of these shifts we witness at a more intentional designed level from the inside. Digital culture moved from anonymous chatrooms and social media messengers to dating apps as a space for women and queer people to explore intimacy, pleasure and connection without judgment or punishment (a part of that too exists alongside). This shifted the lens through which we thought of female and queer sexuality, agency and safety in this country. The ideas of female sexuality have often been tied to the national imagination of modernity and desires. A small (often privileged in capital and dwelling) section of our society has even come to hesitantly accept not just the openness of this sexual liberation, but also, other forms of companionship that exist beyond their normative concept of monogamy.
Until a few years ago, there was a sense of awkwardness for couples to acknowledge that their story began online, ironically even for those who sought out their partners on matrimonial sites like shaadi.com. It’s taken us a while to accept that online relationships can be deeply meaningful, and leave a trace in our real lives.
I have half-consciously thought about this passingly while reflecting on my friends’ and my own experiences of using these apps. The ambiguous nature of dating that allows for intimacy to be felt without defining it often makes it harder to grieve when it’s lost. Marianne (played by Kate Winslet) in Sense & Sensibility (1995) described the uncertainty of it perfectly. When asked if her relationship was defined, she says, “Not absolutely. It was everyday implied but never declared. Sometimes I thought it had been but it never was”.
Online dating has come to signify a rather predictable sequence for these connections to follow, and while it feels safer and gives us more control of the pace and to set our boundaries, there’s also a fatigue that seeps in over time. These fragile matches initially depend on regular digital exchanges – the back and forth messages, the reels and the links shared, the calls, and, more recently, an overlapping algorithmic presence with the people we surround ourselves with. Physical proximity or not, one gets to learn a person in the way that intimacy is built through regularity.
The internet’s current (and my) beloved characters, Shane and Ilya from Heated Rivalry (2025), gives us a picture of the intensity of their intimacy that builds over almost a decade through continuous text threads, aided by the occasional hookups. We witness the layers to their intimacy: them leaning towards each other over texts, admitting and omitting their feelings, the ambiguity that lingers between them, the intensity of their feeling that cannot be said out loud (except in heartbreakingly beautiful Russian monologue or under the influence of drugs). The comfort and safety of their online relationship then surfaces in the moments when they meet.
Like any other human connection, digital intimacies are also fleeting, they exist in the in-between, the online space that gradually seeps into our real world. At a moment, it draws a whole picture of someone’s daily life, from the mundane interaction with a co-passenger to the profound discovery of their inner world filled with hopes and joys. When these fleeting connections end, for whatever reason, is it the inbox that misses their notification of a random photo shared, or do we? Perhaps it’s for these reasons that they say it’s harder to get over situationships, because it takes so much longer for the people involved to accept how deeply close they might have felt. The dismissive attitude towards connection that doesn’t fall under the “defined” categories, only adds to the murkiness of it all in the process of closure. For a while, we didn’t have the vocabulary to validate such online intimacies. Now, our dictionary has updated to accommodate all these kinds of pain and agony, thrill and anxiety that dating comes with – from soft boy allure to breadcrumbing and wokefishing, all the love-bombing to stashing and then the eventual slow fade, but the harshest of it all has to be ghosting!
But far too often, we focus on intimacy in dyadic sense, when so much of the online world is a collective experience, like the ones we see in fandoms. At one level, there’s an intimacy of knowing and following a celebrity/show itself, but there’s also a more equal exchange when connecting with other fans for the simple joy of sharing this love. The established common ground has also been known to provide a safe space for belonging and exploring, especially for queer people. In such scenarios, the intimacy lies in the collective validation of a genuine part of one’s interest; it’s in the acceptance of that side which fulfils an innate need in us to belong. Recently, a classmate from college reached out to me on Instagram, quite self-conscious in her approach at the beginning. She wanted to gush about all things Heated Rivalry, after seeing the countless traces of fondness for the show I’ve left online. It’s these pockets of unexpected opportunity to relate and create meaning with someone online, that we so often take for granted.
Maybe, digital intimacy too, is built on these leaps we take to be uncomfortable and vulnerable – to be seen, to share and remember. Or perhaps digital intimacy lives in the everyday act of showing up – in the little box of lip balm your friend got from a museum you mentioned years ago, the quick friendly check-ins, the soup delivered to your home when you are sick and alone in a faraway city, or simply body-doubling to make sure you get your work done.
Reference:
Vishnupriya Das. 2019. ‘Dating Applications, Intimacy, and Cosmopolitan Desire in India’. In Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Illustrated by Rajlakshmi
