Was it a good fling? As long as everyone had fun, it’s still a positive story in my book!
FinnAgain, I definitely know the feeling of being able to have good, open, honest conversations online and having it be a little tougher sometimes in person. I have one IRL friend that I just find it easier to talk to via email than face-to-face. But I hope that doesn’t mean I’m anti-social!
And I’m totally with you on HATING the phone. New Doper Guy and I are meeting tomorrow and we haven’t talked on the phone at all. I’d just rather have it this way because I know it would be SOOO awkward on the phone. I have a hard time talking to people I know really well on the phone, let alone someone I don’t know. That has absolutely no bearing on how compatible I am with someone in person. But it’s yet another thing that friends are finding strange about this whole situation.
I am going to have to tell everyone to mind their own business. But they’re friends and I know they’re just worried about me. And by tomorrow night I’ll know how it’s gone! Woo!
See, those mind control drugs we gave her back in the early part of the decade are still working! Woo hoo!
Seriously, one very small caveat: people in real life have always come across to me as just a tad different than online. Maybe it’s other stimuli (sight/sound/smell), maybe it’s the awkwardness of any first meeting, maybe it’s the lack of lag time that a keyboard interface affords one, but it is just slightly different. Don’t panic! This fades quickly.
I met my wife on a Buffy board. Major problem being that we lived on opposite coasts. 6 months of developing on-line romance led to a fly-out. One year later I proposed, one year after that we were wed. Best thing that ever happened to me! 
I have no romantical stories about online stuff, but I have a large number of friends that I met initially through the internet. I met my best friend through an AOL bulletin board almost nine years ago. About seven years ago, I hosted something like a Dopefest (only it wasn’t the SDMB group, but another message board) and had something like 60 people come in from all over the country, ALL of whom were meeting for the first time - three weddings resulted from that party. I write for an e-zine that has a strong community of writers who have gotten to be friends over the last few years.
As in “real” life, I’ve met a few real losers, too, but on the whole I’ve found that online losers are just about as common as real life losers… which is to say, not that common.
I’ve only ever dated guys I’ve met online - for over 10 years now. All of the guys I’ve ever met were pretty much the same in person as they were online. Once we met up once or twice, we were as good as “IRL” friends.
Some I am still friends with, others I wish would die ( 
) but the way things ended up had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that we met online.
You’re lucky tho - online dating is MUCH more accepted than it was just a few years ago. I am actually pretty shocked that your friends are making such a stink out of it.
Just do it!
I’ve made some great friends online. Mostly I met them at larger, organized events, though, not one-on-one. I met my husband (SuaSponte) at an NYC Dopefest back in 2001.
I think there are about a dozen couples who have met due to the SDMB. There have been other threads about it, if you feel like searching.
Have you talked on the phone while using a webcam (my audio never works properly with the webcam)? TonyF and I did that for the first couple of weeks, and I think that it drew us closer because we got to see each other and talk like we were in person. It was great because we were doing this until 6am during the weekends so it was like sneaking out to meet your boyfriend/girlfriend without getting in trouble!*
I had lots of fun watching him have problems with his camcorder, but try to fix it, and he had fun watching me try to stay awake. It’s those things that you remember when you look back on how everything started. Makes you all warm and fuzzy inside 
*Do note that I met the SO while I was in high school, so the parents restricted how much we actually saw each other.
Most of my friends that I see regularly I know thanks to the SDMB. My roommate when I first moved to Chicago I met through LiveJournal, to which we’d both arrived through the SDMB (she doesn’t post here a whole lot, but she’d been to a Dopefest and people told her to get an LJ). We’re still good friends, but we’re no longer roommates, because she got married - to a Doper, of course.
I’ve met an almost ridiculously huge number of Dopers in person (including five people who’ve already posted in this thread!) and 98% of them were nice people I’d happily hang out with again.
RickQ and I met right here at the Dope. You can tell your friends that you know someone crazy enough that she flew to England (from the US) to meet an online romance–at least you aren’t doing that! Worked out pretty well, though–we have been married almost 3 years now and couldn’t be happier.
I’ve been part of an Usenet/Undernet/LJ group of fun-loving folks since my university days, and we tend to have somewhat annual get togethers which get dozens of people all over the country in one place for a weekend. Most of us haven’t met the others before, although there’re always the returning attendees to throw off the count.
Good times. Nobody’s been murdered by an axe murderer that I know of, although we’ve certainly had our share of drama over the years (both good and bad).
However, I do reiterate the previous folks’ advice to meet in well populated public places the first few times, and use appropriate cautions.
I’ve met lots of interesting people online. I met two boyfriends through one particular Usenet newsgroup. I don’t think it’s any more or less dangerous, dorky, what have you, than meeting someone “in person” first.
Like ZipperJJ, I’ve met nearly all my SOs in the past few years online. Since I don’t “go out,” and for a long time had equally stay-at-home friends, there weren’t many other options. My friends are laughing at me now because the person I’m now seeing isn’t someone I met online. But they introduced me to him (he’s CG, or cute groomsman, of a couple MMPs ago) so they know he’s all right.
I met a guy online through a silly game back in 1999. He was from Australia and I was living in the US at the time, and we’d talk a lot because he was generally online at Uni working on his assignments when I got home from my 2pm-10pm work shift. We got attached to each other and decided to meet in 2001, when he flew over to Canada and I drove up to pick him up from the airport and stay with his Aunt.
Of course everyone in my family thought I was nuts, planning a 2-week holiday with some guy I’d never met in person before. But I knew that he was genuine, after all we’d talked I just couldn’t fathom that someone had kept up such an elabourate lie the whole time.
Of course, he turned out to be a serial murderer fleeing from the authorities, and I only barely managed to escape becoming his 12th victim…
…
In actuality, I moved to Australia to be with him in 2003 and just yesterday we got our provisional de-facto relationship visa application approved, so I’m here for good now. As I told my parents, “If he is really a serial killer, do you think he’s going to routinely spend $3000 on plane tickets just to kill me? And face extradition to the US for it? Come on.”
People who see serial killers and paedophiles lurking behind every IM window really need to fine-tune their “gut senses”. Can you imagine how paranoid they must feel every time they have to share an elevator with just one other stranger? :rolleyes:
Hooray for happy ending Caiata. Good to hear you’ve got your permanent visa-doobly going on. [Hijack] Was it hard to get? We’ve just put in the spouse visa application for my hubby, and the immi department are already asking for more paperwork. It’s scary [/Hijack]
I met my husband through the SDMB. 5 years ago I packed up and moved across the country to shack up with him, and our second wedding anniversary is next month. More than 75% of our wedding guest list were Dopers. All of the friends we get together with in this area, usually once a month or more, we met through the SDMB. Great people here.
Relax, be yourself, and have a great time!
Hi Sierra,
It wasn’t actually overly difficult. They do request a lot of paperwork, and they did the same thing of us. With the de facto relationship applications they need a lot more proof that my partner and I have really integrated our lives, so they wanted a lot of financial statements, receipts with both our names on it, etc. I’ve been told by my migration agent that actual we’ve-been-married-already spouse applications go through a little easier.
Once we sent in all the paperwork, though, everything went quite well. Our interview took a little over an hour, and at the end of it our case officer told us she was definitely prepared to approve the application and I’d get my visa later that afternoon. She then gave us a really detailed list of all the things we’ll need to do before our next hearing in 2 years, so that I’ll be sure to get my permanent residency. I was expecting it to be very confrontational and aggressive questioning, but it was a very pleasant interview.
Don’t let it scare you - from my experience, the immigration people can tell if you’re genuine or not, and everything else they ask you to do is just for bureaucracy’s sake. Your performance in the interview is the big factor – if you both are friendly and honest, they’ll be happy to overlook any paperwork deficiencies and go with their intuition.
I met my SO online as well. The wedding is in September. He’s a Doper actually
Really, meeting people online allows you to do a great deal of the tedious weeding out of blatantly unsuitable persons from the comfort of your jammies in your own home. Meeting people online more or less guarantees you have at least SOMETHING in common, which meeting people in singles bars or clubs does not (not counting a willingness to consume a lot of alcohol in public of course - but that’s not precisely a stellar indication of a meaningful relationship :P).
It’s my personal opinion that people are (on average of course) a little more genuine to who they really are online.
I met my current girlfriend online (not on the SDMB, though). This is nothing new for me - I’ve been meeting people online for a long time. A good portion of my ex-girlfriends were people I met initially online. This is the first time I’ve experienced the meet-someone-who-lives-far-away thing - I’m in Florida, she’s in Ontario (near Niagara Falls, though - not too far from the US border.) I actually met her when I went to Toronto to meet three female friends from the same web site, one of which I was very interested in romantically. But as it worked out, she wasn’t the one I ended up dating. Go figure. Heh… Anyway, we met back in November and things are going extremely well with us. She’s able to visit here for about a month at a time so we’ve had a chance to really see how well we work together. So far, so good.
Nobody I’ve ever met online has turned out to be any sort of dangerous psycho. Most people are pretty much exactly who they say they are. I don’t think the percentage of liars, jerks and psychos on the net is any higher than it is in the real world.