Jean Lyles has never met Kyle Griffith. But the 55-year-old North Carolina woman and the 51-year-old California man plan to wed March 21.
Even then, they will not walk down the aisle together. They will not kiss. They will not even be face-to-face.
They will exchange vows by computer.
Lyles, who works for American Airlines, and Griffith, a computer programmer for a defense contractor, are planning a cyberwedding. Romances have flourished for years over the increasingly popular on-line services that let couples type messages on their computers and then send them to each other in a flash over telephone networks. But theirs may be the first marriage ceremony, albeit not legally binding, that actually takes place across cyberspace.
Many on-line romances resulted in conventional marriages through commercial services, such as America Online or Prodigy, as well as on the Internet, a worldwide web of 25,000 computer networks. “Real-life romance has gotten so scary,” particularly with the threat of AIDS, said Rosalind Beth Resnick, author of the upcoming book “Electronic Infidelity: How Computer Sex is Reshaping American Marriage.”
“This is a safe way for people to meet each other and fall in love.”
While Griffith, an author of occult books and on-line magazines, has been known to spend as much as 20 hours a day typing to distant friends on his computer, Lyles didn’t even own a computer until September.
“I didn’t know anything about all this on-line stuff,” said Lyles, who lived in Arlington, Texas, for five years in the 1980s while working at American’s learning center near Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport. But that didn’t matter. When Griffith “all of a sudden popped the cyber question” on Jan. 16, she said yes.
Their “church” will be an electronic forum called the New Age Network, where anybody who wants to attend the wedding can just dial in and hook into what amounts to a computer conference call. Afterward, a “reception” will be held in the forum’s Zodiac Lounge.
The ceremony will be much like a computer-screen play, with actions and songs noted as events progress, Griffith said.
The bride has chosen her maid of honor and bridesmaid. The groom will be accompanied by his best man. Viewers will watch as the script calls for the party to walk down the aisle. The conference director, a woman who moderates the discussion, will then direct the couple to exchange their vows.
The non-binding marriage will last only “until we both agree to break it off.”
If the phenomenon takes root, norms may have to change, said Howard Rheingold, editor of Whole Earth Review and author of “Virtual Community,” a book about how computer networks affect people’s lives. Marriages will take place not just across state lines but across national and continental borders.
For Lyles and Griffith, dealing with it means an elegant ’90s way of recognizing that relationships change. Both the groom and bride have been married before. Now, if they want to give up their cybermarriage, one partner can just send a piece of electronic mail and have the other spouse type “OK” and punch the reply button.
The couple first met on-screen Jan. 1, when Lyles stuck up for Griffith in an on-line argument. The two have been cyberdating since, carrying on private computer conversations every night.
There is, of course, one difficulty about a computer marriage: consummating it.
If one day Griffith and Lyles decide to live together, that might happen, but so far even their on-line conversations don’t include any electronic eroticism. “It’s certainly not cybersex anyway,” she said. “We think that is an oxymoron.”
