I know it’s fashionable to say that we like people for their minds, and that the Internet is nice because we can get to know the ‘real’ person without being distracted by insignificant physical details, but the reality is that we generally care a *lot about the physical stuff.
I met my wife online, but it was a local BBS and we met in person almost immediately. She had met all kinds of other people online as well, but knew she wasn’t interested as soon as she met them. This being a local BBS, that happened usually within a day or so (we were always having ‘user meets’, softball games, etc). If she had met these people on the Internet over a long distance, it might have taken a plane ride to find out that she wasn’t interested. And no, it’s not as simple as a person being ugly or fat - it can just be the way they carry themselves, personal hygiene, bad habits, or a zillion little signals that you get about a person when face-to-face that you just don’t get over the internet. That guy who talks like Shakespeare on the net may turn out to have 20 gold chains, pick his nose, have a green tooth and leer at every woman that walks by. You just never know.