I dunno, if his writing makes me taste black bile, then what do you think?
If I ever see his face, I want it to be news footage of him being deposited into a timecapsule that will not be opened until 2040.
Meatspace??? I’ve been giggling over that term for hours. Is this a Dope-specific phrase?
betenoir - sorry thing didn’t work out like you hoped. That always sucks.
Probably because you are an asshole when you say it. As always, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. When you say it, you’re an asshole, when some others say it, they’re just expressing an opinion.
What you seem to be missing Diogenes the Cynic, is that all communication, whether it be online, face to face, on the phone, or by the ol’ fashioned method of writing letters, is a means of exchanging information. All methods have their strengths and weaknesses.
Talking to someone face to face certainly allows you to take advantage of body language and other visual cues to “get to know” the person, but that doesn’t mean that by meeting face to face, you can gaurantee that you really know that person.
Talking face to face suffers from people making assumptions, often wrong, based on appearance. An astute fraud can use appearance to lie. They can appear to be something they’re not. No matter how well you think you know someone in real life, there is always a chance that you don’t know them as well as you think.
Talking to someone on the internet has the benefit that there are no initial assumptions other than the words of the person. IF those words are an accurate representation of that person, i.e., they are not setting out to lie to you, then it can be a very good way to get to know someone’s mind without your judgement being clouded by appearances. If those words are not accurate, and that person is setting out to mislead you, then you may find yourself bewildered and hurt further down the track. But then, as I said, that can happen in “real life” too.
The point has been made earlier that written communication is poor because it gives people a chance to edit what they want to say. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. A lot can be communicated about someone by whether they even bother to carefully phrase their words, or let it out in a stream of consciousness, whether they let spelling errors stand, or try and make their posts/emails/IMs worthy of an English assignment.
A lot of people in real life do this exact same editing. You may come across people who say little, and when they do talk it is well thought out. Other people just splurt out whatever happens to be running through their head at the time. Through written communication and verbal communication you can get different clues about someone’s personality. Neither method is the be all and end all.
To suggest that an internet relationship is somehow invalid until you meet the person is arrogant and insulting. An internet relationship is a relationship just like a face to face one. It is based on a different means of gathering information about the other person. It is a means through which it is easier to mislead. But if both people have approached the relationship honestly then it is just as valid as any other.
I met my wife on the internet, within a week or two we were talking on the phone, a few months after that we met. I knew her better, in a shorter period of time, than I had ever known any of my other girl friends. Why? Because when we talked, we actually had to talk. We couldn’t just go out to a pub, drink beer, and play pool. We were forced to communicate.
As a comparison, an earlier “real life” girlfriend, I knew very little about. She’d told me she was 26 (I was 20 :D) but I later found out that she was actually 35! Now which of these two relationships was more valid? The early internet/phone one with my wife, or the in-the-flesh one with a girl who turned out to be 9 years older than I thought?
Except that I never said it wasn’t a real relationship. I said it wasn’t a real *romantic * relationship. Huge difference. After YEARS of playing house on the computer, it was no more a romance than if she were carrying on with an inflatable doll.
Liar, liar. The very first sentence of your very first post in this thread:
Even if you’d said it couldn’t be a romantic relationship, that’s an arbitrary and stupid standard. A couple centuries ago, people used to conduct romances by letter, and it would be just as foolish to claim that those weren’t real.
Your standard for what constitutes a real relationship is irrelevant, contemptuous, and contemptible.
Daniel
Context, Dorkie…context. SHE was the one who inferred the romance. I didn’t think I had to spell it out that I was talking along those same lines.
Yes, a long time ago people carried on romances via letters…but they progressed to the next step within a reasonable amount of time. Our poster and her friend didn’t. When push came to shove, he bailed. No commitment, no face-to-face contact, no future. Certainly no romantic relationship. This was no more than a bud that failed to bloom.
Who cares what stupid metaphors you apply to it? She had a painful experience that she was sharing; your first post (and follow-ups) comprise a sneering dismissal of her experience that demonstrates your own lack of empathy (not sympathy, empathy) and have nothing to do with what she wrote.
Daniel
What’s a “reasonable amount of time?” My mother-in-law and her husband corresponded for four years before they had the opportunity to actually go on a date.
I guess their relationship magically turned “real” when they went out? Or was it their wedding day when they were a “real” relationship? Maybe it wasn’t “real” until thel produced children.
You’re full of shit, duckie. You can’t say, “…an on-line relationship ‘can’t’ be real,” and then turn around and say, “I never said it wasn’t a real relationship.” Yes. You did. Right there. By virtue of having taken place online, it was not, in your opinion, a “real” relationship. No amount of tap-dancing and “what I meant was” and “but in context…” Nuh uh. You can’t deliver an absolute and then go, “Oh, except…” when it doesn’t work out in your favor.
I neither sneered at nor dismissed her real pain over the situation. You can read whatever you want into it. Your lack of basic comprehension skills certainly can’t be remedied here. You’ll need real-life assistance with that. As for empathy, no…I cannot identify with someone who can get so emotionally involved with a person for that long a period of time without taking it to the next step. But I can certainly identify with heartbreak.
I got ‘meatspace’ from the MUD/MUSH/MUX community (mu*) probably…geez…about thirteen years ago now. I don’t know where Finn got it, but I don’t see it often.
Your parents moved on to the next step. This guy dismissed her without a second thought. You obviously have lower standards for what you expect out of a romantic relationship. The vast majority of folks prefer concrete evidence that the person they’re in love with is more than a string of words on a screen.
- Here we have proof that you don’t actually read what you’re replying to. My mother**-in-law**. Them “mov[ing] on to the next step” has nothing to do with my point, which was that they corresponded for four years and didn’t have a date. This was to refute your
- Yes, he did, which has nothing to do with how they met.
- Exactly what the fuck are you implying? “lower standards?”
- Who said they didn’t?
It’s amazing how I didn’t even know who you were, and now I actively think you’re bacteria on God’s perineum.
Whatever, asshole. The point is that it is unnatural to carry on for years without meeting the object of your affection. The OP said this guy suddenly dumped her like a side dish he didn’t order. I dunno…I just don’t feel the love…
It happened to work out with your in-laws. In most cases, it ends badly for someone who was imagining more of a bond than actually existed. If you can manage to connect “Part A” with “Part B”, then yes, there was something there to build a real life relationship on. In the OP’s case, not so much, huh?
I don’t know where the fuck you get that “where they met” has anything to do with this conversation. The point is that if you’re unable to move on to the real life part of a love relationship, then it’s not real. Her on-line friend made it pretty clear he had no intention of bringing it to the next plateau (though I would have probably gotten the hint after the first few months). Not only that, but he didn’t feel he was able to tell her that he didn’t have strong feelings for her until he brutally dumped her. That’s the level of intimacy you find in a relationship of a few weeks…not a few years. But hey…if that sounds like a relationship that’s come full circle to YOU, I can see why you think this would somehow be fulfilling.
Here’s the part where you show me where I said that kind of relationship was fulfilling OR had closure.
Look…I’ve got better things to do than argue with someone about the merits of holding out hope for a relationship after years in “on line only” status. There are none. If you want to talk about meeting people on line and moving on to real-life love, that’s another thread.
Why are there “none”? People can give examples of this working out, so why are you being so certain and definite and inflexible? What you’re doing is calling the OP a fool, based on your own rigid opinions about how things should work. If the OP had dated someone for years and never ended up in a permanent relationship, does that mean their interactions weren’t “real”? If the OP didn’t get disappointed and in fact met this guy and had a torrid affair, would that have made their online conversations somehow more legit?
If it results are good it was “real” but if the results are bad it was never “real” at all?
What if the guy had been hit by a bus a year ago? Would you have said, “Hey, that sucks, but since your relationship was never real, I don’t know what your problem is. I can’t empathize with you losing this person because you never met and therefore shouldn’t fool yourself that it meant anything.”
If DtC did know you, would that count as a real relationship, then?
I cannot think of a scenario where several years of never having a face-to-face meeting with a potential partner is even possible if you really want it to happen (with the exception of a military deployment…if that’s the case, I apologize).
Even people who have foreign work-permit problems are able to at least visit each other once in a while. If it’s impossible to do that, the logical step is to move on to a relationship that has potential. In the OP’s defense, she never mentioned if her friend was from another country, which would make it more difficult, for sure. But she also didn’t mention that they had made plans to build a life together, to look for a place, to take trips to see each other, meet family or friends, save money for the trip for either one of them…none of the things that indicate a serious desire to intertwine lives. The only information I’ve seen is that they chatted each other up on line for several years and he freaked when she missed his phone call. And ended the relationship over that. The friendship sounds real enough. But where’s the inclination to move it to the next step? We’re talking *several years * here!
No, I’m a disembodied web phantom.
No. He used it as an excuse, very clearly: he ended the relationship over the fact that he wanted to move on, possibly to a relationship that was in-person. Certainly I can understand someone’s desire to do so; it’s much easier for me to understand than a desire not to do so.
But, and here’ the thing, I’m not coming in and sneering at someone because their relationship sin’t the kind I’d prefer.
Daniel