Anyone who has spent even a short amount of time in SL™ will have witnessed what seems to be a common sport in game, of partner juggling. Ok, granted, sometimes people split up for whatever reason. S**t happens and all that good stuff. But I am really getting bored of seeing people who get married to someone different every week. Let me give you an example. We’ll take a guy and call him Bob and take a girl and call her Annie. Aww. Look, aren’t they sweet?

Anyway, look. There they are, all in love. Everything is hunky-dory, marvellous. They can’t get enough of one another and spend their days and nights on poseballs staring at pixel stars and telling one another how there is nobody else in Second Life™ who could ever compare. Annie writes in her profile, “Bob I luv ya babez! Alwayz and 4eva and galz he is mine. Hands off!” She follows this with song lyrics. Because that’s what people do in profiles. Bob writes in his profile “Annie u made me so happy when u said youd be my wife. I’ll luv u alwayz!” (It’s like an unwritten rule that spelling in 80% of SL profiles has to be appalling, by the way). And so there they are. They were married within fifteen minutes of meeting of course, and the first days are amazing. But disaster! On day 3 Bob is shopping when another girl (let’s call her Polly) accidentally brushes her pixel hand across his in a virtual mall. The world stops immediately. Bob is in love. He pays the L$25 divorcing fee, drops Annie a notecard (“It’s over. I’ve filed our pixel papers. Your stuff is in your inventory. Goodbye, Annie.”) and moves in with Polly. Annie is depressed, heartbroken in fact and changes her profile to some equally depressing lyrics and a picture of them together, with a big red cross through it. Bob and Polly marry. They spend their days on poseballs, blah blah, just like above. All is perfect. Annie’s heartbreak lasts seemingly forever, an hour and a half in fact, before she meets someone else, marries again and changes her profile to reflect her new state of contentment. All is not so well for Bob, though, as he realises he is in love with someone else. Let’s call her Mary. Mary is Polly’s friend. They tried for so so so long to suppress their feelings for another so as not to hurt Polly, but after 23 seconds it was all too much, Bob cracked, divorced Polly and married Mary. That same day. That same hour in fact. All was well until…..

Anyway, you get the idea! What on Earth is with this partner swapping like it’s some sort of sport. Has somebody failed to let me in on a secret? Are Linden Labs offering money to the avatar who goes through the most partners in a year? Is there some sort of contagious disease going around whereby if you stick with the same partner for more than 4 days you will spontaneously combust, Linden Labs will reclaim all your Lindens and fifteen million children in Africa will just blow up?

No. There is no big secret, I’m quite sure. My personal opinion is that the only diseases that are going around are indecisiveness andI’m-so-fickle-itis. Nobody is saying never, ever, ever split up with anyone. But seriously? All this partner swapping and juggling?! It’s making me dizzy!

Categories: Second Life

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Second Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.