“Other world”
Love Virtually“Other world” is Emmi and Leo’s name for the intimate space their emails create beyond Emmi’s family life. It is not simply an escape from her marriage: Emmi describes it as a necessary boundary, a place where she can depend on Leo while keeping him outside the life she shares with Bernhard.
An island outside daily life
Emmi first defines the space as non-family time: a tiny island outside her daily experience, which she would rather inhabit with Leo alone. The image takes shape after she explains that her family includes Fiona, sixteen, Jonas, eleven, and her considerably older husband, Bernhard. Having finished that account, she asks Leo to leave the children out of their exchanges. Her request draws a line around the correspondence: she wants it to be a place apart, not another channel for discussing domestic responsibilities.
Leo accepts the island metaphor while admitting his curiosity about the mainland. He wonders what Emmi is like in her grounded life, in the secure harbor of her marriage, but says that he is back on the island now. His playful shift between island and harbor registers the distinction as something they can negotiate in words, even as the correspondence keeps pressing toward the life beyond the screen.
The household as a fortress
When Leo returns to the question of how she copes with marriage, Emmi turns her home into a chorus of witnesses. In her study, Bernhard is still working, Fiona is staying with a friend, Jonas is asleep, and Wurlitzer is eating dog food. The furniture seems to suspect betrayal: the piano warns her not to reveal that Bernhard was her piano teacher or that she and Bernhard kissed and made love on it; the bookcase wonders who Leo is and why Emmi is so preoccupied; the CD player fears that she will give up Rachmaninoff to discover Leo’s musical tastes. Even the bed warns her not to lie there dreaming of being elsewhere. The wine rack alone is friendly toward Leo, jokingly treating the three of them as companions.
The comic inventory gives way to a firm declaration: Emmi cannot share this world with Leo, and he can never become part of it. She calls her marriage a fortress that cannot be penetrated or conquered. The barrier is not presented as proof that her marriage is loveless. She says that Bernhard worships her, that she respects and treasures him, and that they depend on each other. They share music, theater, many friends, and a life they have built together. She also describes her bond with Fiona as almost sisterly and says she has become a kind of mother to Jonas, whose own mother died when he was three.
A refuge with rules
Emmi’s boundary is protective as well as restrictive. She tells Leo that she will speak about home when she wants to confide in a close friend, but permits him to tell her about his private life in exhaustive detail, with one explicit limit: he must not make it erotic. Her terms preserve her control over how her household enters their correspondence while leaving room for emotional disclosure. The arrangement is deliberately unequal: Leo may bring his private life to her, while she decides when to open the family album.
She explains the need beneath that arrangement without disguising her dependence. She is glad Leo is back; she needs him to live, breathe, and feel beyond her world at home, and calls him her other world. The phrase makes the correspondence more than a diversion: it is a necessary counter-space, but one whose usefulness depends on remaining outside the family fortress. Her wish to keep Leo apart from her daily life coexists with her fear of losing him if that separation fails.
Leo’s answer and the metaphor’s limits
Leo answers from the same imagined geography. He promises not to intrude on the Rothner household and says he will restrict his dealings with Emmi to the screen. He also jokes about a future midnight rendezvous involving Emmi and the wine cabinet, recalling the household object that had defended him. His response affirms the screen as a boundary, but the joke keeps alive the possibility of crossing it.
The metaphor also exposes a difference in what each wants from the connection. Emmi emphasizes that Leo must remain outside her established life; Leo says he would like to be someone’s real world, not merely her other world. He is attracted to women who are not already happily married and enclosed in a family fortress. Until such a woman comes along, he tells Emmi, he will take her up on her offer and think of her before Marlene, though he doubts that he will always manage it. The island is therefore a refuge they share, but not a settled answer to their different desires: Emmi needs its separation, while Leo acknowledges wanting a relationship that can exist in ordinary life.
