I Fell in Love in an Online Game at the Turn of the Century

But make no mistake, this is not a love story

Cobalt Scar dawns cold and clear. We shelter in a quiet corner away from the othmir and wyverns that want our blood. They’d kill us on sight due to our relentless hunting of their kind.

Manazz and I would round up the creatures, herd them into a confused cluster, and chip away at their mortality with our spells—swarms of bees, tangles of vines, blasts of searing fire.

Their deaths made us stronger. And for that, they would never forgive us.

A message floats across my screen, breaking the immersion for a moment.

– I heard a song today that felt like it was about us…

– Me too!

– I think it was by the Goo Goo Dolls

– Iris? That’s the one I was talking about!

– I think so? It goes, ‘I would give up forever to touch you…’

And just like that, I’m no longer a druid hunting wyverns beside her mentor in the frozen wastes. I’m Karen, in love with Dave, who is not my husband and lives 1,500 miles away in Canada with his wife and children.

And we’ve just named our anthem.

And I’d give up forever to touch you
‘Cause I know that you feel me somehow
You’re the closest to Heaven that I’ll ever be
And I don’t wanna go home right now

And all I can taste is this moment
And all I can breathe is your life
And sooner or later, it’s over
I just don’t wanna miss you tonight

God! That’s it, isn’t it? This feeling. We would give up forever to touch one another, and our relationship thrives on that impossibility. We both say we love our families. We don’t want to disrupt them. We don’t want to hurt anyone, but…

Manazz holds Shayalyn tightly

– Connected…

It’s our word: “connected.” We believe we are. Across miles and a slow, unstable dial-up connection, we’ve formed an unbreakable bond, reading each other’s thoughts and sensing each other’s movements. We’re free in the game world, discovering that connection one quest goal at a time.

Peter joined me in EverQuest shortly after I started playing. That was my husband’s M.O.; whither thou goest, I shall go. Whether you want me to or not.

Peter trusted me to be loyal, and in terms of physical intimacy, I was.

He knew me to be empathetic and forgiving. He’d heard me cover for him often enough to believe I would protect his dysfunctions. I was “in on the fun.”

He trusted me to be faithful even as I confronted him with evidence of another affair.

He trusted me to keep quiet about the times he shoved me or backed me into a corner and screamed in my face—no one needed to know what went on inside our home.

He trusted me to have his back even as he stabbed me in mine.

But in EverQuest’s world of Norrath, all bets were off. Peter’s mage character was what we gamers called “squishy.” He could send in a pet elemental and hammer monsters with fire bolts and other damage spells, but if he played badly, he “drew aggro.” All of the monsters we were fighting would turn on him, and since mages tended to be soft and studious (they didn’t have many “hit points”), they died quickly.

And death in EverQuest had consequences. If you didn’t happen to have a cleric around to “rez” you, you lost a significant chunk of experience in a world where the goal was to level up. Hours of progress disappeared in a blink.

When Peter joined our adventuring groups, the dynamic shifted from one of spirited competition and friendly banter to something more like this:

Spiritmystic tells the group, ‘I need a heal! I’m dying!’

Shayalyn tells the group, ‘Toodles! Maybe you’ll learn to stop pulling aggro.’

Every session with Peter meant navigating his incompetence. In Norrath, I didn’t feel compelled to cover for him the way I did in real life.

I was a badass player; he was just a bad one.

And that felt good.

* * * *

Manazz and I teleport to the druid rings in Greater Faydark and head for Kelethin, the tree city of our wood elf tribe. None of the monsters here want to harm us. They’ve long since learned we’re stronger than they are. We ride the lifts into the forest canopy and sit overlooking the dark, mysterious landscape.

Haunting, ethereal music plays in the background as we talk.

–Tell me one bad thing you’ve done and it better be evil. Like, so evil you would say it was ‘EE-vil,’ I say to Manazz.

– Like the froo-its of the dev-il? EEE-vil?

– I love that you’re coming along with me on this. Yes. Eeeee-vil.

– Hmm. I’m a pretty good guy, I think. But when I was younger, I beat the shit out of an Indian for mouthing off to me. Pretty evil. But you could argue he had it coming?

Wait.

This isn’t fantasy anymore.

– Dave…

– It’s probably not a thing in Wisconsin because you don’t have Indians everywhere, but if you lived in Alberta, you’d understand

I don’t have much experience with Indigenous people firsthand. But I’m fully aware that the Wisconsin cities surrounding me have names that came from native roots: Okauchee, Waukesha, Oconomowoc, Pewaukee. That’s not the point, though. Nothing in my world view would permit me to feel good about harming anyone, especially someone from a people already ravaged by oppression

I could tell Dave that. But I don’t. I can’t. I need to sustain this fantasy. The one where Dave tells me I’m perfect, everything he’s ever wanted, someone he’d give up forever to touch.

I need that world.

– Now, what’s something evil you’ve done? Manazz asks.

– What? My dear, I’m a saint …

– The wyverns in Cobalt Scar beg to differ

– I grouped with Jaxyn yesterday for a while and we took out a bunch. I dinged 55 on that run. So, not truly evil, but maybe evil-adjacent?

– I hate that

– That I leveled up? That I nuked wyverns? That’s kind of the goal, right?

– That you played with Jax. I want to keep you to myself

Dave hates that I played with Jax? The kid is at least ten years younger than we are and works at Dave’s LAN center, basically a cybercafe for gamers. And as far as I could tell, Dave and Jax were friends.

Shayalyn laughs at Manazz

– I’m not joking, he says.

I log off a few minutes later, claiming exhaustion and a need to sleep so I could wake the kids up for school in four hours.

* * * *

I log in on a Monday morning after getting the kids off to school and Peter off to work. Before I can choose a destination, Jaxyn messages me.

– So, hi, Shay. I’m going to be leaving the game. I thought you should know. Maybe not forever, just a break.

– No! Why? You’re almost at the level cap. You’re on top of the world, dude!

– Can we be honest?

– Always.

– So, Dave got in my face at work last night about grouping with you. And it was bad.

– Bad how?

– He loves you. He sees me as a threat. And I don’t want to come between you guys.

But that’s ridiculous. Dave’s married. Dave has kids, too. We can’t—won’t ever—be together in the real world. And if we were, would he bully any man who dared to befriend me?

What is this thing I need from him, from this game? What am I willing to endure to sustain this fantasy of “perfect love?”

* * * *

Jax leaves with quiet integrity, never telling anyone the real reason behind his departure from Norrath. But I know. And Dave knows. And that knowing simmers between us.

Jax’s exit wasn’t dramatic, but plenty of guild drama followed as we navigated the emotional territory this online world had opened up. Guild members fell for each other. Real-life families dissolved into chaos.

One beloved guild family—a grandfather whose real-world name was Dan, his son Danny, and his daughter, Dani—also famously imploded when Dani left her husband and children to be with her EQ paramour, Symphonique, an ostentatious half-elf bard the rest of us merely tolerated.

As the mortar of our fantasy world crumbled, Dave and I doubled down on our romance. I called him late at night at the LAN center, which stayed open overnight for obsessed gamers playing CounterStrike and StarCraft.

Those calls from the U.S. to Canada ran up a $400 long-distance bill I couldn’t hide from Peter. Every call to Alberta was there in black and white, complete with dates and durations.

When Peter burst into our bedroom while I was quietly reading, I knew what was coming. He hurled a stack of papers onto the bed, eyes narrowed with hostility, and said in a low, steady voice, “Care to explain this?”

I gathered up the papers and the moment I started reading the text, I froze. This wasn’t the phone bill. They were my EQ chat logs. Irrefutable evidence of my indiscretions.

“Role-playing,” I answered calmly.

Next, Peter dropped the phone bill onto the comforter, his face an angry grimace. “And this?”

Strategy sessions for upcoming guild raids? He’d never believe it. Peter knew what lying looked like. He knew what it felt like to fabricate something until it settled into your bones and almost became the truth. How could I hope to fool someone who was himself an expert liar and cheat?

“I love Dave,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”

“You mean your lover!”

“It’s just a fantasy. I’m here, aren’t I? In our bed?”

Over the next hour, Peter humiliated me by hissing line after line of steamy chat transcripts, spitting venom at me like a cobra.

Finally, I sat up, clutching the sheets to my chest, and declared, “Enough.”

But Peter was too far gone. “Enough? It’s enough for you? Well, that’s going to be a problem.”

“So you’ve decided to hurt yourself by reading a bunch of chat logs? Fine, I guess, but that’s on you.”

“Oh, really?” His favorite phrase. “Oh, really? That’s how you see it?”

He was getting loud enough to wake the kids. He leaned down into my face, causing me to flinch back, and shouted, “You’re gonna tell me right now—do you want me or him?”

I closed my eyes. Ran a hand across my face to wipe Peter’s spittle away. Breathed in. Out. Clenched my jaw as I crossed my arms across my chest.

I summon Sullon Zek, goddess of rage and strength.

I summon Quellious, goddess of tranquility.

When I raised my eyes to meet his, it was with sudden clarity: I didn’t need divine intervention.

“Neither!” I cried. “I don’t want either one of you. Leave me the fuck alone!”

The walls reverberated as Peter slammed the door and went to sleep in the basement. By morning, he’d be playing the victim: the abused man forced onto a nasty old couch in a dank basement cluttered with Internet porn and photos of women he’d been hooking up with online. Months later, my mom would go looking for him during a visit only to find him at his desk with his sweat pants around his ankles.

He claimed he had an itch.

And he believed it was the same sort of itch that drove me to Dave.

In some ways, perhaps it was—an addiction to feeling desired, to having someone, somewhere, find me special and worth loving, even from a distance.

* * * *

I look back on that time from my new world, 2,000 miles from the place where Dave and EverQuest once consumed my life. Here, I gather with real people and form real friendships.

My days in EverQuest wound down quickly after Peter discovered my chat logs. Manazz and Shayalyn were legendary partners no more. But I stayed with the guild for a while, quietly taking over as raid leader and helping other players earn their epic weapons long after Dave skulked away to lick his wounds.

I logged into EQ a few years after everything fell apart to find my guild distractingly quiet. Dan, Danny, and their friend Ajax were still camped at their favorite hunting spots, grinding away, eternally caught in the game’s loop. (I never learned what happened to Dani, and I was too afraid to ask.) But the soothing music of Kelethin had lost its quiet charm, questing solo felt like a grind, and there was no one truly left to talk to. All that remained was a subtle longing wrapped in nostalgia.

Peter, “squishy” in every sense, clung to me after I left, trying to preserve the facade of our marriage while living with a girlfriend he’d had—and denied having—since before I moved west. And I let him because I couldn’t survive without his financial help. I was making just over $2,000 a month, paying $1,050 plus utilities for a run-down apartment, and helping support my two college-age kids.

Peter was amicable when I filed for divorce a year later. “We’re better friends than husband and wife,” he said. “Don’t you think?” But I knew that was how he told himself he hadn’t failed us, hadn’t been abusive, hadn’t lied and cheated. As long as we were still friends, he was off the hook, right?

I wasn’t buying it. “What about alimony?” I asked.

“We don’t need that,” Peter said. “I’ll take care of you and the kids. You know that, hon.”

But I was not his “hon.” And no, he wouldn’t. If I stopped giving him what he needed from me, he’d stop giving me what I deserved from him.

All I wanted now was freedom.

“That’s fine,” I said.

And a few months later, in a courtroom full of other women ending their marriages, the judge asked whether mine was “irretrievably broken.” I stood tall, squared my shoulders, and said, “Yes.”