I hear a lot of stories about people meeting over the internet spanning long distances, leading to a wonderful relationship. Some are spread out over long amounts of time, and others are very fast.
What I don’t hear much about is long-distance disappointments. The thing is, it has got to happen once in a while- as much as you can get an idea of someone from e-mail and phone conversations, actually being around them is a whole different animal. I myself had a previous girlfriend who lived three hours away, visiting on alternating weekends and holidays. It flopped after a year, and one of my biggest regrets was drawing it out over a year with someone who lived so far away.
One of my friend’s roomates met a guy on Ragnarok online. She was 22 and he was 16 (granted she acted pretty immature). They got ‘married’ in-game and eventually he invited her to visit him in LA at his parent’s house during his birthday. After a long Greyhound bus ride, she arrived. She later told us that the entire weekend was a huge disappointment- the guy had never been in any relationships/kissed a girl, so he was incredibly shy when she showed up and would just sit there and stare at the floor the whole time. Ironically, she was really interested in him, and it sounded like she was intent on violating a few statuatory rape laws with him but that never happened.
Many moons ago (five or six years ago), before I met my husband (online) I was involved in a relationship with a guy in Florida, when I was in Australia.
We spent every day on the phone, hours online. We were madly in love, used to play the same roleplaying games and we’d started to make plans for me to come over there. I’d put the deposit on my plane ticket, was paying it off and getting packed to go…
When he told me, over IM, he’d fallen in love with another girl. Who wasn’t even local, as in another internet girl. And they’d been fooling around for a while before he got the balls up to tell me.
So now I had a useless plane ticket. Luckily I was able to cancel and get refunded my money. But yeah, that turned out pretty crappily.
Last I’d heard he’d ditched that other girl for yet another online girl, but this one he’d actually managed to get out to meet and there were all sorts of starry-eyed plans about being together forever, coz he lost his virginity to her.
…Ohio. I was in California. We IM’d, talked on the phone for months and he wanted to visit. I said I’d love to meet him but would not do much of anything differently than if he was coming to see me from a neighboring city—the fact he was flying in cross-country was not going to grant him instant access to anything. I would meet him at a restuarant and we’d see if the chemistry was there. He said if he just wanted sex, there were cheaper ways to go about it in his hometown, so no pressure.
We met. Wow. Chemistry! We had a great time the first day and evening and he went back to his hotel and I was so looking foward to spending the next day with him, pondering how huge of a slut would I be if I went back to his hotel with him the next night? Not a huge slut, I was a grown woman…We did a touristy thing he wanted to do all day and I had told him Thursday night was my Girl’s Night Out but I would run in, say Hi and spend the evening with him. He wanted to meet my friends I had told him so much about and everyone thought he was dreamy when we got there.
Then the complaining started. He was tired. He hated dancing. He hated this music. Couldn’t we go back to his hotel? Sure, if he felt under the weather, let’s get you back. Why didn’t I come up? He had, after all, come all this way and spend all kinds of money to come and see me…
I didn’t go up. He said he’d call tomorrow and we’d do another touristy thing. He called me the next day saying he was on his way to the airport. This trip sucked and he had brought Viagra and everything! He was going home. I never heard from him again, no IMs, no emails. There must have been cheaper ways to go about it at home…
Well, first of all, I have yet to be convinced that there is anything but weirdos and booty calls to be found in online dating.
I think the worst idea I’ve ever seen is trying to maintain your old high school relationship when you go off to college. Your 18 years old, on your own for the first time, within a year or so, you probably will never hang out with your old high school friends the same way again, AND there are a million single college girls/guys around. What are you holding on to?