Put me down with Stonebow,** DooWahDiddy** and** chatelaine**. Met my wife on a Buffy board. Wooed her online, fell in love online. Happily married and still madly in love with each other. Gonna parrot the line too: Been there, done that. Have the wedding band to prove it.
Ooh! I win! A trip to Tahiti? Satisfaction? A Victorian poet with strange poems who wears an even stranger beard?
No, silly! You win The Internet! You don’t even have to share!
<Mr. Burns>Excellent.</Mr. Burns> Now get offa my lawn! 
The woman I met online in December proposed last night 
(we bought a house together in May). I’m absolutely happy and I’m more in love with her every day. Anybody wanna see my ring? ::big goofy grin::
Oh, noooo. See, I won the Internet, too. It’s just a different one. You win the shiny new Internet 2005! I’ve got the 2004 model.
Absolutely. I met my hubby online five years ago. Distance and lack of funds prohibited meeting face-to-face for 18 months. Until then, we used every form of communication- email, IM, video confrence, letters, care packages etc. We shared absolutely everything in those 18 months-- the good, the bad, and the ugly.
He immigrated from the UK in January 2003, and we tied the knot on Valentine’s Day a month later. Been absolutely happy ever since.
I will say that it was sort of odd when he got here. All of a sudden, this man I knew and loved was three dimensional. I could use all 5 senses to take him in, and it took us a couple days to get acquainted with one another physically. It was like falling in love all over again. Exhilarating experience.
Side note (I love telling this story): Because we longed for each other so desperately, we sent physical pieces of ourselves. I sent him a lock of my hair, and a cast of my hand. I asked him to send me a shirt that he’d worn for a week, unwashed. Yeah, it sounds gross, but I wanted to smell him. When our packages arrived, we both got on cam to open them up. We were both moved to tears, it was so powerful.
Believe it or not, his natural body smell truly is better than any cologne. I still stick my nose in his armpits and breathe deep. 
Absolutely yes! And sometimes it makes for a really strong relationship. But I second the people who say you never really know a person until you’ve met them and spent some time with them.
I am all in favor of living together before marriage…unless you are really, really mature, there are some big shocks that come in that first year of marriage when you find out just how cranky (s)he is when (s)he wakes up at 6:00 AM every day. How their habit of butt-scritches drives you insane. And etc.
I fell in love with a guy I met on a local messageboard. I saw his picture and messaged him, then we started IM’ing, then we talked on the phone several times. By the time I finally met him in person I was completely smitten.
It didn’t work out though. I had made him into an unrealistic fantasy and got pretty obsessed. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, but I do think I was really in love with him before we ever met. 
Wow. Falling for someone you’ve never met face-to-face, I can understand, but marrying someone you’ve actually never seen? The mind boggles.
I think the Internet (or other non-face to face communication) can help spark a relationship, but I don’t believe you can fall in love through it. For one thing, Internet personas are highly self-censored. Whenever I post in LJ, or select photos to put online, or write an email to someone, I am making a conscious decision of how to present myself. I am in a sense constructing a better me–my net personality isn’t too dissimilar from my real life one, but they aren’t identical. I’m not talking about outright lies, but rather sins of omission–there are aspects of myself that I don’t reveal to the Internet because I don’t want to ruin the highly polished facade of the online persona. If I did this kind of self-censoring in my daily life, it would drive me nuts and wouldn’t work anyway. You don’t know the whole person until you see them live, uncensored, in their worst moments as well as their best.
Also, I do believe there is such a thing as a physical spark that has to happen between people. I know people who have great personalities and are attractive but I would never want to initiate a relationship with them, because there’s just no physical attraction. If I saw a picture of them, I might be deluded into thinking there would be since they’re cute, but cute doesn’t always equal “dateworthy.” And since you (or at least me) just don’t know if there’s going to be a physical spark until you actually meet the person in reality and get the compatible pheromones flowing, it’s impossible to gauge it from the Internet.
My parents married this way, as did many other Indians of that generation. I’m not saying they’re happy, on the contrary. But they never talked or anything…first meeting was wedding day, in any shape or form.
Correct me if I’m mis-reading here or misinterpreting, but those of you that say yes it’s possible then say that your online/phone/mail relationships led to a face-to-face at which point your feelings were validated, seem to me to be arguing against your “yes” votes.
I think you can develop strong feelings for someone that way, learn mutual interests, get to know the more cerebral/emotional things, but “love” (to me anyhow) depends a lot on those intangibles that you only get to know once you’re with someone physically. See them in the morning, smell their breath, those kinds of things.
Cunctator said it pretty well about falling for the image, but love is reality and reality isn’t online, or on the phone.
Add me to the list. Met my wife on ICQ. We talked online and by phone for seven months before we met. All we had were pictures. We’ve been married five years now and we couldn’t be happier.
I think a big reason for our success is the huge amount of communication before we met face to face. We got to know the inner people inside…the ones who will not change as hairlines recede and waistlines expand. As a bonus, we have sex like monkeys in heat.
IMHO, mr bus guy, Cunctator, and Shirley Ujest have it right. Until you’ve met someone and have come to know them in person, you are in love with an image that’s been constructed in your own mind.
Maybe that applies to all of you, but for many of us, we were in love with the person. The man I met in person for the first time was the same man that I had been in love with during our talks on the phone or email or via IM.
So yes, it can happen. We’d seen the bad and the good and the ugly of each other before we’d even met. My husband and I were in the same email group for more than seven years before I took a fall from my horse, was laid up, and we started chatting all the time. He watched me ignore him during one of my lows with my depression, he made crude jokes to me that made me laugh. I knew I was in love with him before I even stepped off the train on the way to Ohio to visit him.
And when we met, it was the same thing. He still told crude jokes that made me laugh, I still had lows that scared the hell out of him. We were engaged ten months after meeting, married a year after that, and we’ll be married for a year in September. I can’t imagine falling in love with anyone else at any time with any other crude jokes.
People can tell me over and over and over again that there’s no way we could have been in love before we’d met in person, and I’ll tell them the same thing I tell everyone else - bullsh*t. And we’re not the only ones.
E.
I’m going to say yes, to a degree. I met **KeithT **here, not all that long ago, and was absolutely crazy about him long before we met. Like **fishbicycle **and Mrs. fishbicycle, we had a TON in common and just felt that it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. Too many “what ifs” not to take the chance and meet. And meeting turned out to be just wonderful.
However, as **Shirley **and others have said, actually being with someone in person is a lot different than online/phone/long distance. When you’re in your own apartment/house, by yourself, you don’t have to compromise. Once you’re together, even for weekend visits, you do. And that’s where you find out if the commonalities, the attraction, and the love are enough to overcome the other differences. No two people are exactly the same so there always will be differences. They crop up a lot more in person than online, and it takes work to get through those.
That being said, I can certainly see being with **KeithT **forever and we’re very very happy. The love (or infatuation or whatever one wants to call it) that we felt before we met has just grown through the ups and downs that we’ve already experienced and I think will continue to through the ups and downs we’ll face together in the future.
But now you’re getting into the sticky world of semantics. Who can say at what moment they fell in love? Or how deep that love was at any certain time? All I know is that I, along with a surprisingly large number of other Dopers, came to the conclusion that we had met the person we wanted to marry before we met them in person. That feeling was only magnified once we met, and here we are 5 years later and life is good.
So, whether this will last a lifetime I don’t know, but I’d say the length of these relationships prove that it isn’t just a fluke, or just “falling in love with an image”.
I’d say so. There are a few male Dopers who I’ve come close to falling in love with over the years and I love Polycarp like a brother even though I’ve only met him twice. One of the main reasons I didn’t let go enough to fall in love with a Doper is because I was burned by a long distance romance and had no desire to repeat the experience. Then again, I’m a bit of a hopeless romantic.
CJ