I’ve had 2 Internet romances (well, okay, one romance and one casual boink), and damn near had a third with this woman I was totally ga-ga over. I still kick myself for not acting on that third woman sooner.
But the fact that none of these ladies were local killed it, every time. Long-distance relationships just do not work for me in the long run. (They don’t seem to work out for others much, either – witness Satan and Heatherlee.)
I met a woman at a message board, she was very intelligent, outspoken, and had a dry sense of humor similar to mine. We fell for each other, then she drove down to meet me (2000 miles, but she did have other relatives in the area).
In person she was very shy and very submissive, I couldn’t seem to bring her out in conversation. She stayed with me a couple of weeks, then went home. I was kinda happy when she left.
Then we go back to chatting on the internet, and she is back to being the woman I fell in love with. A few months later she flew me up to stay with her for a couple of weeks.
Same thing. We never seemed to talk, just lay around, read, and have sex all day. We went out and did things, but it didn’t seem to help. Went back home.
Then she was back to normal, but was starting to show a jealous side I hadn’t seen. We had agreed that it was OK to see other people when we weren’t together, and I actively tried to encourage her to, felt that maybe getting out more would help her open up. Eventually she got mad at me over a minor thing and implied she was breaking up with me. I knew that she didn’t mean it and was waiting for me to apologize to get her back, but I realized I did not want a relationship with this woman so I never did. She later told a bunch of her internet friends some very personal things I had told her (regarding some criminal activity I was involved in) and some of them brought them up to flame me in these same forums where we met. So that relationship did not end nicely.
Another time I met and corresponded with a girl in email (a friend of a friend) and we were really hitting it off, but when we met in person she immediately decided there was no chemistry and stopped talking to me.
Those are my only two experiences in internet romance. I know a guy who meets girls a lot in chat and he is pretty happy with it, but he is not looking for long-term relationships, just sex. I guess it’s good for that, but you can’t really know someone until you have spent time with them in person.
As I am in a ‘online romance’ right now, I know they can work. Long distance as well. Being far apart from each other forces us to hone our communication skills and open up to each other.
We have met once, for about nine days when she came up to see me and we meshed perfectly. I plan on going to visit her in October, and I am looking forward to it, as is she:)
On the other hand, I have met several women off the net prior to meeting ~Amber-Skye~ that definitely fit the “didn’t work out” scenario and one that was a “worst date”
-Chris
Just to add myself to the pile, I met my girlfriend in a chatroom in the Netherlands (the chatroom was there, not us). We chatted for a couple of months, I drove out to Minnesota to see her, she moved here (to Denver), and they lived happily ever after.
Well, maybe not ever after. It’s been five years, and we just bought a house, but it’s looking good.
Of course, Satan and I live right next door to one another…
Seriously, though, it depends on the people involved, and how much it’s worth to you. We’ve been doing the long-distance thing for almost a year now, and it’s going stronger than ever. Of course, the fact that we only have 10 more weeks of living 554 (but who’s counting) miles apart certainly helps.
If you’re going to do the long-distance thing, it helps if you have a few fundamentals.
[ul]
[li]Good communication skills. Brian and I wouldn’t be where we are today if either of us were not completely open with the other.[/li][li]Money. It costs him approximately $80 in gas alone to visit me. We both pay about $100 a month in phone bills. We constantly joke that when we finally move in together, we won’t know what to do with all the extra cash we’ll have.[/li][li]Absolute trust in one another. If I were a jealous person, or thought I had any reason to believe that he would cheat, I couldn’t be with him. When you’re far from someone, you have no way of knowing where they are and what they’re doing. If you don’t trust the person completely, the distance can magnify little doubts and misgivings.[/li][li]The patience of fucking Job. I think this one speaks for itself.[/li][/ul]
There are more little things, but those four, I think, are absolutely necessary. If either you or your partner in the long-distance relationship is lacking any one of those, it’l probably fail.
So, just how patient do you have to be to fuck Job? 
(Er, sorry. I couldn’t resist.)
The two best relationships I’ve been in have both been with people I met over the internet… the first lived pretty far away (Alaska), but she had plans to visit relatives here for a month, which is why she was looking for people in my town on ICQ and came across me in the first place.
The second (my current SO) lived about 20 minutes away from me, then we broke up, then she invited me over when she was staying two hours away, and now she lives in Seattle, four hours away. That’s about as much distance as I can handle.
Really, almost all the relationships I’ve been in have been with people I met over the net… but I used it as a place to meet people, like a club or a dating service, not a vehicle for romance.
So to answer the OP: if you were me, you wouldn’t fire anything up unless you and she would be able to see each other easily and often. Getting to know someone and forge a connection takes more than just words on the screen.
It may be important to note that, here on the SDMB, you are dealing with a segment of the populus that is very computer- and Internet-oriented. Maybe that predisposes us for a better rate of success in on-line romances than other people.
A person’s writings on a computer seem to be a more direct pipeline into their imagination. While in some ways that may be more intimate than “real-life” relationships, it is often not fully reflective of the way people act and behave in their non-computer lives. It seems as though it’s easier to maintain dishonesty through an on-line relationship as well.
If you only know someone via the computer, I submit that you don’t really know them fully, and could be in for a rude awakening when you make the transition to a face-to-face relationship.
Can it work? Sure. It often does. But it will, obviously, eventually either work out or not on its “real-life” merits.
But you don’t really know them when you meet them face-to-face either. We all like to tell ourselves that we have killer intuition, and that we can sense a liar or a cheat or a leche or a chain-saw weilding maniac just by looking them deep in the eyes, but the fact is that intelligent, sensible people get suckered by people they meet in RL all the time. Now, I will admit that a realtionship that stays on line (as opposed to one that originates on line, which is really very different) makes it easier to conceal aspects of your personality than say a relationship where you say, share a biosphere, but we are talking about shades of grey, not black and white. A couple that were set up by mutual friends and go out 3x a week can also conceal an awful lot of themselves.
I agree. But you have more pieces of the puzzle to work with, rather than their thoughts translated into written words on a computer screen.
Mr. Carniviousplant and I met on line in a Star Trek sim room. Been married for almost five years now.