Move over, “There’s not enough space on my iPod” and “I can’t find a celebrity for my Facebook that looks like me,” there’s a NEW first world problem in town: the elationship! While UNC babez are struggling to find a man, any man, our protagonist Rich Giorgi is one town over struggling with a much more grotesque dating issue:

Now, there’s a new online annoyance — the person who doesn’t want to meet but is all too happy to e-mail, text, tweet, IM, or scrawl on your Facebook wall indefinitely. They don’t want a real relationship as much as its virtual doppelganger.

Welcome to the world of the “elationship.”

“I’ve been involved in five or six of these,” says Rich Giorgi, a 48-year-old tech writer from Carrboro, N.C., who in recent months found a “peach” of a girlfriend and left the online scene. “One woman was always popping up on chat programs — ‘What are you doing? Where you have been?’ This went on for a month and then I proposed we meet. But she was always busy. So I called her on it and she said, ‘I’m getting what I need out of this. There’s no need to go any further.’ So I cut it off. I didn’t have the time to waste.”

Look, as a loner/stoner, I hate humanity too…but I don’t feel the need to get all e-cold fish on people. Just drink a fucking beer, man!

You might be asking yourself, as I did after a crippling resin high, why would someone spend all that time communicating with a person they never planned to meet? Fortunately the article asked and answered that question:

Giorgi says he thinks some singles just like to collect “cyber-harems.”

“I have a friend who’s on a dating site and I can see that a lot of the people from the site have started following her on Facebook,” he says. “She has 12 to 15 guys all commenting on her posts and looking to get with her but she’s only interested in the attention. She’s told me plainly that she’s not interested in meeting anybody, she just wants to feel like people want her every now and then.”

Yeah, why would you want to meet anyone? I know after a brutal 50-hour work week, all I ever want to do is interface with a machine and have strangers compete for my attenti—- Jesus, I can’t even be sarcastic about this. It really IS that pathetic.

Maybe it’s a generational gap. Just like how no one over 30 understands the appeal of Jersey Shore, maybe none of us who grew up in the Myspace echo chamber will ever get why you would even want to be a creep online if you’re not going to fucking get gross. All I know is, the next time I run into a Haitian, I’m totally gonna ask if s/he can relate to the following:

“There’s the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of making a fool of yourself,” [psychologist Patricia Wallace] says. “An online relationship is perceived as being lower risk as compared to meeting in person. When you pick up the phone or meet in person, you have a lot less control over your message and your impression as compared to a Facebook wall post or an IM where you can rewrite and think about what you want to say.”