He says po-tay-to, she says po-tah-to. He says to-may-to, she says to-mah-to, He says web page, gigabytes, and cyberspace, and she says - duh.

Christy is not completely computer illiterate. She has a computer at work and one at home. She has several programs. She uses them to write letters, balance her checkbook and keep track of her expenses. She has installed a few games for her nieces.

But logging on after dinner to surf the net is not her idea of fun. “Why not read a book, call a friend, see a movie? I’d rather watch TV than sit in front of my computer.”

And then there’s Gordon, a cyberstud. They met through friends. Gordon called Christy and the first night they talked for hours.

“We had so much in common,” says Christy. “Foreign films, Asian food, basketball. We were the same religion. I felt like we knew each other intimately before our first date.”

Even their differences were exciting. Christy is the artistic type. She took Gordon to gallery openings and his first jazz performance. “I turned him on to groups he had never heard of. His CD collection grew by about a 100 percent in the first two months we were dating.”

Gordon works in the financial world. He’s good with numbers. Christy thought it was sexy that he knew what NASDAQ was and which way interest rates were going.

“I’m thinking about buying a condo and it feels great having a boyfriend who can advise me on mortgages and stuff. Gordon reads the Wall Street Journal cover to cover every day.”

And Gordon loves his computer. He experiments with programs the way Christy tries different coffees from Starbucks.

When they first started going out, they would talk on the phone every night. “Even when we’d spent the evening together, he’d call me after he got home. We’d watch TV together from our separate apartments.”

But then Gordon got hooked on the Internet. His phone was always busy. He started speaking a language Christy didn’t understand. He went places she couldn’t follow. His idea of joy was cruising that big old information superhighway to heaven.

“He entered a foreign world when he went online. It was almost like he was cheating on me with his computer. I know he hasn’t met anyone online or anything like that. I’ve asked him point blank. He denies it and I believe him. But I feel like I’ve lost him to a new passion in the way that other girls become football widows. At least they get their men back after the Super Bowl. I have to compete with a computer that sits there every day, day in and day out.”

Gordon has told Cristy that she is, in a word, nuts. She’s a living breathing human being. The computer is a computer.

But it’s not really the computer that Christy is jealous of, it’s the new world that has opened up to Gordon because of it.

“I see how into it he gets when we’re with someone who’s more computer literate than I am. They talk the same language. They tell him new things to check out. They launch into these conversations I don’t understand and find boring.”

Christy sees trouble. What if Gordon meets a cyberbunny - an attractive, single woman who loves to go online as much as he does?

“I’d lose him.”

xxxx?