I’ll tell you this much about him: He has soft eyes and a wonderful smile. He’s taller than me. He’s very good with computers. His accent in English is terrible. He likes his privacy. In 2016, after several years of a simple and warm love affair, we hit a snag. We had decided to live together, and that I would emigrate to Europe. But to do this, we had to prove our relationship to the government. The instructions on how to do this skewed toward the modern forms of relationships: social media connections; emails; chats; pictures of the happy couple. He read through this, and showed it to me. We both laughed. Our relationship had left few traces in the digital world. We had none of these things.
We met a few years before at a drinks night for a hacker collective. A mutual friend introduced me by name, and him by handle. I liked him instantly. We chatted for a few moments, but I had to run. I set up a time to meet up with him later that weekend, and then missed it after falling ill.
“Oh well,” I thought, “so much for that.”
We bumped into each other a few weeks later on a public IRC channel, and I recognized his handle. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a massive chat system, like a command-line version of Slack. In fact, Slack is a fancy interface for IRC with added features, but no added privacy. An IRC server knows everything you say on it, just as the Slack servers do. I told him that I’d still love to chat, but he warned me that he didn’t come to IRC much. I gave him my Jabber address, and suggested that we continue our conversation privately. This time, we managed to chat.
Jabber is different from most chat protocols in that it’s decentralized. There’s no Jabber-the-company with only Jabber servers, like there is in the cases of Google or WhatsApp. This meant we could use servers run by whomever, in whichever country we liked. My only contact for this mysterious man (whom I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about) was this Jabber address, which he had configured to refuse any unencrypted messages. Jabber itself doesn’t encrypt messages, but another protocol called OTR (Off-The-Record) creates a layer of encryption inside other communication systems. It would be as if I called you, but the conversation were in a secret language only we knew. Someone could tap the line and listen, but they wouldn’t understand us. OTR has another property, called Perfect Forward Secrecy. With Perfect Forward Secrecy, new encryption keys are created for every session, so that even if one is broken, it’s only broken that one time. It doesn’t give an interloper any more access to messages in the future, or past. It would be as if when I called you, we invented a new language to communicate every time we spoke—a new language we both understood instantly, every time.
We started a conversation this way—intimate, private—in our textual world for two; it’s a conversation that is still going. Most Jabber clients are smart enough to realize that if you’re encrypted, you don’t want to log conversations, and that was our case as well. Those chats in the early days are gone. Some live in my memory, some in his, but most are as lost and fragmented as conversations in the rain.
I do remember I complained to him a lot—about journalism, sources, stories, writing; about trying to do something important. He always seemed to listen and care, in the strange body language that lives in chat pauses. He was sensible, positive, and encouraging. I remember that I told him I was frustrated with being a woman trying to write longform subjective journalism, and that I felt there was so much I wasn’t socially allowed to do. He asked me about it more, and I listed out all the ways I felt my gender was limiting my writing. He was quiet for a moment, and then reposted my list to me in our chat — but as a to-do list. I looked at my computer and took a deep breath. I wanted to cry, but I also felt like it was time. I took that to-do list, and turned it into my final, longest, and best piece of journalism for Wired. But he doesn’t remember this, and has to trust me that it happened. In an age in which every relationship is automatically documented, this one has remained ephemeral, contained in the shifting sands of our human memory—the way all relationships used to be.
“I feel like what we keep in our minds is more important,” he wrote to me over WhatsApp recently. “The accuracy of it is…mah.” This is his disdain for this digital accuracy, and it captures something. There’s an obvious, almost legalistic veracity of moment-to-moment logging, but that loses a truth that the impressionism of memory catches better. I didn’t fall in love with him word by word or sentence by sentence. I fell in love with him slowly and steadily through time, in the spaces between the words, held up by the words. Losing the words sometimes feels frustrating, but that forgetting also removes the scaffolding from a finished past—a past that was never really containable in a logfile.
As those first weeks stretched into months, he became my imaginary friend, the person who no one else knew was there. We spoke every day, usually on OTR, always encrypted. When we passed files using unencrypted file sharing programs and websites, we’d first encrypt them with command line tools and share decryption passwords in our OTR chats.
These were not easy to use, and required long and esoteric commands, such as:
> openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -in for-you.mp3 -out for-you.mp3.enc
This meant that though our communications were on the open internet, they were just meaningless blobs of text without the password we’d shared over chat. I read him poems into a microphone and sent them to him. I sent him pictures. I don’t remember many specifics, and I can’t look them up now, but I remember I loved it.
I wanted a way to communicate on the phone. We used TextSecure and RedPhone (which later became Signal). We sent pictures to each other— usually me to him, and usually pictures of funny things I’d seen in my day.
I found myself in London, and jokingly (not at all jokingly) tried to get him to come visit me. He demurred, but countered that I could come visit him a bit later in Luxembourg. A few weeks later I was in Paris’ Gare de l’Est, cash-bought ticket in hand, boarding an express train to the main station in Luxembourg City.
I still didn’t know this man’s legal name. I didn’t even realize that Luxembourg was a different country. We had a lovely weekend. I told him, “I want to show you a movie to help you understand my culture and my people,” and I showed him a John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. We sat, side by side on a couch with a laptop balanced across our thighs, and watched it. He told me at the end that he liked it very much. We walked around the city in the daytime, sitting in parks and eating takeout food together. We talked about the internet, activism, journalism, and computers. By the end of the weekend I knew his name, but I still called him by his handle — I was used to it.
Everything was still platonic, but I knew I didn’t want it to be.
Several months later, we went together to Berlin. Standing on a friend’s balcony in the middle of the night, I asked if I could kiss him, and he said yes.
Not long after, I came to the attention of a media storm after being struck by a tragedy. My life imploded, and between grieving and dealing with media controversy, my days became a sickening tragicomedy I couldn’t turn off. He became my refuge; his apartment became the only place I felt safe. He looked after me, made sure I was eating, held me, walked with me, and let me cry on him. At the moment when we might have become more public as a couple, he didn’t want any part of my media ordeal. “If a reporter calls me, I will be very mean with them,” he told me. I laughed and agreed. I didn’t want any part of it either. But when I was away, he was still with me, checking in over the encrypted links we’d built. I don’t remember much of that terrible time, but I remember the sense that he was there, quietly present, from thousands of miles away.
There are few pictures of us together. Very few were taken by us; neither of us are much for selfies. Those that do exist, we ask our friends to keep offline.
We know that the vague and soft anonymity of our relationship probably won’t last forever. And I doubt there will ever be a surfeit of digital connections between us. Our phones trace the paths we walk together, existing in telecom databases (and more recently, in WhatsApp’s logfiles) long after we’ve moved on. Their cell tower and GPS logs are like a pair of maze paths with no walls, lines coming together and parting, and coming together again. But what we said on those walks is lost, even to us. Only the feelings, memories, and paths remain.
Those paths have traced across three continents now, traveling together, often visiting friends. We are not at all a secret couple. Our friends and communities know us as a couple — with something of an information security bent. Introducing him to my friends and family (first by handle, then later by name) has been one of my great joys. I’m intensely proud of him, and still a bit giddy that I get to spend time with him.
My love affair has taught me that the age of data makes time solid in a way that it didn’t used to be. I have a calendar and email archive that nails down the when/where/who of everything I’ve done. I know when my kid was here; the last time I saw a friend in New York; exactly what my last email exchange with my mother was. Not so with my lover. Time is a softer thing for us. Sometimes it seems like he’s always been there, sometimes it seems like we’re a brand new thing. Every other relationship in my life is more nailed down than this one.
“Every time I look at an old mail, I feel weird, like I prefer the memory I have of a thing than the accurate recording,” he told me.
He doesn’t mean an email from me. We have never exchanged email.
I’ll tell you a little more about him: He tolerates no nonsense. He expects clear and timely communication and honesty. He rarely sees the point of being subtle, especially on important matters. We make things plain to each other. Over the years, inside our little tunnels of encryption, we told our stories, explained ourselves to each other. We became quiet voices in each other’s minds. In the absence of a perfect record, we settled for trust.
So it was, in 2016, we had to document our relationship to the satisfaction of the modern nation-state. At the bottom of the government instructions for how we could do this, there was one old-fashioned option left to us — letters from friends and family attesting to our love. So that’s what we gathered.
One friend wrote in his letter:
Another wrote:
I don’t know if anyone in the government actually read the letters — governments these days have a flawed love for metadata over actual information — but we did. Having your friends and community testifying to your love beats all the selfies in the world.
Either way, I received my Carte de Séjour, the government’s permission to live with my lover in Europe, and I moved to be with him.
In May of last year we went back to Berlin. I took him, naturally, to the Stasi museum. When we got to the director’s old office, I took a deep breath and proposed to him. Instead of a ring, I gave him a USB key. (Bought with cash, and I’m not telling you what was on it.)
He said yes.
Then he looked at me quizzically, and asked, “Is this why you’ve been so nervous this week?”
“Yes! It’s incredibly nerve-wracking!” I said, and we went for coffee. So that’s how it all happened.
But you’ll have to take my word for it.
