Me: You don’t want to talk to me?
She: I’m going to be late.
Me: You have an hour still.
She: It’s not like we’re really saying anything important right now. Let’s talk later, and we’ll have more to talk about.
Me: I was just about to say something important.
She: Okay. What do you want to say?
Me: No. I can’t.
She: What do you mean you can’t?
Me: The moment’s gone.
She: Oh, God. Tell me what you wanted to say.
Me: No, no, no.
She: Why the hell not?

Of course I have nothing to say. It’s just that I find it difficult to re-enter the ordinary boredom of my real life. I call this the “Skype Get a Grip Factor.” When it came time to get on with our day-to-day lives at the end of a call, I’d realize I was not in the same room as my partner, but separated by thousands of miles. I found it difficult to return to the tedious and unnerving everyday. I was neither alone, with the compensations of perfect solitude, nor with my warm-blooded partner.

It was in the middle of the fourth month apart that we discovered a novel approach: Scrabulous and Skype. The secret to sustaining virtual love may be . . . to get more virtual. Spending time playing online Scrabble meant that my girlfriend and I didn’t have to just talk on Skype; we could hang out, drink wine or tea, listen to music together. The emotional muck of “relationship” conversations could be avoided, and the tedium of “How was your day, sweetie? ” could be replaced by an X here, an O there, and some good, healthy competition.

The non-verbal approach is popular among Skypers. In one YouTube interview, a couple talks about how they sleep with their laptops in bed, each under the gaze of their respective cameras. The woman in this video explains how she once woke up her boyfriend when she was having a nightmare. He adds that she likes being able to see him go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The couple also talked about cooking together, with the camera on, logged into Skype. Everything but the epidermis is shared.

Which brings us to Skype Sex. A friend wrote me, “[Skype] added a bit of erotic juice to things . . . We discovered new possibilities for long-distance intimacy . . . Suffice to say we both laughed a lot afterwards. I’m not sure why. Embarrassment. So wrong it’s right . . . Like you’re slipping a quarter into a skyscraper telescope or midway peep show.” American sex columnist Dana Olsen puts it slightly more crassly: “When used correctly, [Skype] is the best practical-turned-sexual invention since handcuffs . . . The beauty of Skype sex . . . is you can pretend your girlfriend is a porn star . . . except you get to talk to your favorite video girl afterward.” The ’60s was the generation of love. I belong to the generation of mutual masturbation virtuosos.