Betenoir, hang in there. No matter the format, when a relationship we thought was meaningful ends, we all feel hurt, a little weird, ticked off, betrayed, and/or mournful.
It doesn’t matter how others classify it. It meant something to you, and now it’s over. That hurts. I know.
Nor am I. I threw in my two cents. That’s what I’m supposed to do on a message board, right? No sneer. Just an observation and some advice. I have no problem with the OP, and I can understand falling in love with a person’s words. There are plenty of details we don’t know about, and that might change my opinion about the whole thing. I don’t think I was unfeeling. Maybe I wasn’t syrupy about the whole thing, but hey…we’re not all like that. like I said, I understand broken hearts.
I don’t have time to check out her earlier posts, but do I recall correctly that she asserted that she was not staking her future on this guy, didn’t think of him as Mr. Right, but just wanted to meet him because circumstances had become conducive to that happening? And that she was not lying on a chaise holding a faded lily, but merely felt confused and hurt, as many people do when they get dissed?
And yet, in the past, this is exactly what people did. Before mass communication, media, or travel, people wrote letters. Let’s say you have two people, whose parents arranged for them to get married when the kids were still young. They might start writing to one another as young teens for several years before finally being able to meet face to face. This was especially common among royalty and nobility.
Now, sometimes these arrangements didn’t work out, and the marriage was pretty bleak. And yet other times, it wasn’t.
I agree that online ONLY romances are a bad idea. I won’t do them-I’ll be friends with someone, but nothing further unless we meet and it works out then we’ll see. But to say it’s not a relationship at all, well, every situation is different.
Yes, she mentioned that after my first post. She sounds conflicted on the whole thing based on her first two posts. Knowing one thing but feeling another, had a real-life boyfriend, etc. She said that the whole thing got very intense over the last couple months, knows logically he’s not a real boyfriend, etc. She feels shitty and I feel for her.
To that end, then, you can never form any sort of real relationships, you being unreal yourself, because nothing on the web is real, after all. Ergo, you don’t exist, and the 'Dope collected non-existant money for your subscription. Expanding that view, then, since most of us will never know each other except through here, and if here isn’t real, in a sense, none of us exists at all!
[hijack]
My first notice of the word was in “Neuromancer”, first published in 1986. So, twenty years ago*. Also the first time I read the word “cyberspace”. And, just a guess here, it may be where FinnAgain was inspired for his name.
I know it’s been answered by JohnT, but in addition to the Internet, folks could also log onto bulletin boards with modems since at least the early '80s. The Well is a classic example.
[/hijack]
*Twenty years ago. I remember when this book was the beginning of the New Wave of scifi. God I feel old…
I know it’s been addressed already, but, holy motherfucking Barbra Steisand shit in a burrito supreme.
Meatspace.
…
?
MEATSPACE!!?!??
:smack:
I hereby curse thee with the fleas of a thousand camels.
Actually, Gibson coined the word “cyberspace”.
Nope, check the sig.
Or the location, for that matter. 
That reminds me – I never use my sig:
Oops. Well, I *did * say a guess. But let me be more specific:
“…Just a bad guess…”
Hey, man, I just think it’s funny. I hate Gibson, I didn’t know it came from there, though it’s possible he ripped it off the culture, too, I guess.