Internet and a cute Turkish girl

By Shelton Bumgarner

Living in South Korea dramatically changed my life, for better and for worse. While I had a lot of great times in Korea as an expatriate, I also learned that my fellow men can be pretty cold and brutal at times when given the opportunity.

So, when something actually pleasant happens, it is noteworthy.

This particular story begins a few months ago on, of all things, the anonymous chat service known as Omegle. I was going through an Omegle phase and I was determined to have an intelligent conversation using it.

It was during this phase that I came up with the following rule of thumb about using Omegle, “Use Omegle until you have one good conversation that day, then stop. That way you can avoid the bone-crushing sense that there is no hope for humanity.”

Using Omegle can really be that bad.

The service is split into two types of anonymous chat ― text and video.

The text version is pretty bad. All everyone is interested in is “a/s/l” or “age / sex / location.” And once I tell them how old I am, they did not want to talk to me anymore.

I grew frustrated with the text chat, so I went for broke and decided to try to video anonymous chat. I shaved my beard so I wouldn’t look like a complete psycho and delved right in.

There were still a lot of people doing the typical odd and unsettling things you would expect with an anonymous video chat service, but I stumbled across someone who made my day. Her name is Selin and she’s from Turkey.

We had a great hour or so of conversation and we exchanged contact information.

I thought the story would end there, but it keeps going.

Flash forward a few months and Selin and I are actually friends. It is quite pleasant. There is a problem to this little nice story, however.

Selin’s age.

She’s only 18.

Even by just talking to her, I feel like I’ve violated some social norm. She’s in Turkey and I’m in America, so there is no risk of anything untoward happening, but a little part of me feels guilty. Am I doing something wrong?

I mean, she’s easily young enough to be my daughter and if we were at a party together, people would whisper about the situation behind my back.

They say that “age ain’t nothing but a number,” but I still feel guilty.

I am of the age where if I find a woman I like, I think about settling down and having children, but she’s got years to go before she can even drink legally in the United States.

For the time being, I am not going to over-think things. She’s a rare genuinely nice person in a sea of mean, angry people, and I don’t see just being friends with her causing any problems for the foreseeable future.

And I am reminded of the expatriate community in Seoul, where it is not unusual for women just out of college to date men significantly older than them.

I was quick to judge these relationships in the past, but now I find myself thinking maybe I was a bit too harsh. While dramatic age differences cause problems in relationships, the heart wants what it wants and so, sometimes, maybe we should give people a break.

So for the time being, I just enjoy having Selin as a friend. I help her with her English homework and we watch the occasional Woody Allen movie using Skype. Given that we met on Omegle, I guess it proves that sometimes random chance is not as bad as you think.

Shelton Bumgarner, a writer living in Richmond, Va., is working on his first novel. He blogs about it at migukin.wordpress.com. He may be reached directly at migukin@gmail.com.