Online Relationships
I once had a lover (can I use that word at work?). He was someone who wrote a story I read, and responded to my email compliment. We clicked almost immediately and had a few months of insane, crazy, confiding emails. We 'talked' daily - multiple times daily. We had long IM sessions, long into the night - and with a time zone difference, that meant a lot of late nights, candle burning, cigarette in hand, talking to someone I didn't know, yet sharing everything.I loved this man, the way you can only love someone who you know, but you also make up. There were so many things about this man that I didn't know - that I 'made' or 'tweaked' to fit my mold of how and what I wanted him to be. I turned him into exactly who I wanted - some attributes he brought himself, some I gave to him.
Things ended, and not well. We're both self-proclaimed damaged goods, and things, circumstances, feelings and people crowded our thoughts and slowly turned us away from each other. I never met this man, and there's a good chance I never will.
The point I'm trying to get to is that no matter how close you are to someone online, over the phone, in email...it's still no contest for actually meeting them and finding out who they are face-to-face. It's so easy - perhaps too easy - to turn an online friend into an ideal, only to have that image dashed. In reality, that image wasn't true.
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