This is my first post, so be gentle. I’ve got a great story, share yours first!!!
Mine lasted for five months, then kind of crashed.
How will I ever explain it to the kids?
Usually I just say…when people ask…
It’s a long story. Let’s have a drink sometime and I’ll tell you the gories!
Debij and and I met online and have been lovers and friends for 5+ years. With several real life meetings. And a real life future ahead of us.
She lives in Delaware and I in North Carolina.
I love you darling!
I was in Vancouver, BC, my wife in Washington, DC. We met through a penpals site. After writing back and forth for several months, I was transferred to Ontario, whereupon I rented a car and drove down to meet her.
We were married a year later.
I met my SO online. We lived in the same town, and even knew some of the same people but had never met. Using ICQ one night, he searched for locals, and messaged me using ICQ pager. He’d never used pager before, and I’d only been on the internet for a few days at that point, so I wasn’t really familiar with ICQ, but I answered his initial page. Since he’d put his name and ICQ number in the same field, it had been truncated and I couldn’t find him on ICQ, so I replied via email.
A couple of days later, he went through his email and found my reply. He jumped on ICQ, and started chatting to me. As I’ve mentioned here before, he asked me three questions to determine if I was worth pursuing a friendship with:
- Do you like Star Trek?
- Do you like Monty Python?
- Do you like South Park?
For the record, I answered yes, sort of and no!, but he kept talking to me anyway. We got along like a house on fire, and spoke until the sun came up. During the night we took frequent coffee breaks - I’d say “Coffee?” and he’d say “Love one!” and we’d take a break for a couple of minutes. He asked me if I wanted to attend a bbq he was holding the next day in a park in town, and I said ok (It turned out that he was the owner of the ISP I was signed up with! They were holding a bbq for their customers who participated in their chat room). I remember shutting my computer down at 7am, and going in to speak to my parents. Mum got so excited when I told her I’d been talking to a local online, and she said “You’re going to that bbq!”. Anyway, I went to bed to have a nap, and next thing Mum was shaking me awake. She bullied me into getting dressed and going to the bbq, and made my brother drive me there. I only gave in because my brother promised to come and hang out with me.
We got to the park, I walked up to the group, and he and I spotted each other at once. He walked up to me and said “Are you who I think you are?”, and I held up a flask and said “Coffee?”
Well, we spent the whole day together, and the one after that and the one after that. 13 months later, he asked me to marry him, and we’re set to exchange vows before Christmas, 3 years and one month to the day since we met. I often joke about how my soul mate was living only 5 blocks from me, but I had to go on the World Wide Web to meet him!
Oh, and I’ve learned an appreciation for South Park, and improved my aquaintance with Monty Python. And I’ve forgiven my brother for taking off on me once he’d let me out at the park!
I love you, Reeder. Yep, Reeder and I are planning our lives together, and we’re very happy. I’m looking forward to being with him for many years to come. He’s my very best friend and lover.
I have heard of other online romances ending in wedded bliss. My brother-in-law’s youngest brother met his wife online. They’ve been married a few years now, and live in Hawaii. Another couple I know that live in South Carolina have been married and melded two families very successfully.
Online romances can be very rewarding even if they don’t end up in marriage. They can lead to some wonderful friendships.
Like offline relationships, they can be bad too. I think it depends on the people involved.
Hmmm… not that it isn’t common knowledge by now, but I met my sweetie here.
Her name is Serendipity and she’ll probably be along shortly to tell you the whole story.
I didn’t meet my hub on the web. I met him the old-fashioned way…he ran a BBS I called back in the bad old days. I first signed on in 1991 (to HIS board, anyhow), we went to a movie in February of 1992, we got married in March of 1993…and we got internet access in 1996. 
I’ll tell you what…it’s nowhere NEAR as hard to explain to people how we met now as it was five years ago.
My newest, oddly enough. Not that I think of it that way, since I’ve been spending time with him face to face for the most part since. But I initially met him through a role-Playing site when I was looking for a local group to game with. So we have RPed weekly (with breaks when I went home from college) for over a year.
And we’ve been going out since Monday morning, so I’m trying to gush about it overmuch. (I’m not a horribly glurg-y person, I promise…just give me a week or so to let the shiny rub off before I get yelled at…)
But yea, so far its been great.
Had one.
He im’ed me. Talked to me for about a month everyday before we met. Once we met we were unseperable.
We stayed together for 3 months. He dumped me because I cheated on him. We ended up best friends for 3 years.(He even lived with me, watched my nephews, drove my car all the time, and my family LOVED him) Until…:rolleyes: he met another girl online. She told him to get rid of me. He did. I miss him. But I say, if he so easily tossed me aside for someone he hadn’t met, then it wasn’t worth staying with him.
:grumbles: [sub]asshole[/sub]
Oh, I suck at telling the whole story; you’re much more eloquent about it :)… Anyway, once upon a time (last December) someone (Byzantine) started a crush thread, in which Stephen declared he was too broken-hearted to have a crush on anyone, but he did think I was awfully sweet. I e-mailed him to thank him for giving me something to smile about… he wrote back… and I wrote back… and we kept writing back to one another every day… and pretty soon we were talking on AIM every day as well… and not long after that we were talking on the phone every night. Somewhere in there, we fell in love, and I became the happiest, luckiest woman ever. He puts up with my strange moods and general silliness, while I put up with his being perfect. I’m pretty sure I got the better end of the deal. 
I love you, sweetheart.
except for my first one, which got me online.
I will not describe any but my current. We met via irc, were acquaintances for a year, were friends for a year, I was seeing someone locally, broke it off and started a long-distance relationship with my sweetie. Flew down to meet him 6 months later. He lives in Georgia, US. I live in NB, Canada. I luv him. He luvs me. It will be 3 years in January. We’re getting married next summer.
To the OP: using the ‘we’ll talk about it over a drink sometime’ does NOT go over well with US Customs officers. (I need to explain just about every time I cross the border.)
DebiJ, Reeder, you are a patient couple! 5 years? I’m going crazy after THIS long? [sub](was crazy to begin with, but anyhow…)[/sub]
I met a former boyfriend of almost 4 years online. I was hanging around on compuserve waiting for a friend from PA to log on, and I saw someone sign on whose server was in a little city right next to mine. I said hi and we ended up talking for hours. Turns out I was in a debate class in high school with his older brother and a friend of his from church. And, he lived right around the corner from me. So it started online, but I guess it might not really count.
Last summer I met Quixotic78 in chat and we got along famously. He knew all the best infomercials! We met in August and have been together since about then.
Long distance relationships are harder than local ones, but I figure that if the person is special enough you should give it a shot.
Venoma…
We didn’t start as lovers but as friends. We met in an online chatroom…cough [sub]Bianca.com[/sub] cough We are both in loveless marriages, circumstances before now prohibited ending them. I am now in the process of a divorce. Debi will be soon.
Anyway, what’s 5 years in the whole scheme of things? We have the rest of our lives.
Mr. Pol & met over the university VAX e-mail system. You could set up a nickname/alias that would show up when other users searched to see who was on. One of us (can’t remember who) started writing the other based on an intriguing alias.
(Yes, Politzania was one of the ones I used.)
We talked about music (Pink Floyd) & movie interests (Monty Python) and he gave the oh-so-crucial correct answer to: “Does the number 42 mean anything to you at all?”
He skipped a World Series game to come meet me in real life after my then-current boyfriend stood me up. We met in one of the computer labs. I dumped the BF about a week later.
4 years later (a week after I graduated) we got married & 8 years after that - still together!
I met my boyfriend through the non-travel discussion part of a message board devoted to travel. His posts were well-written and always made me laugh, so when I found out his yahoo IM ID, about six months after he joined the site, I messaged him to tell him so.
We talked on IM for about six weeks and then started calling.
We met for the first time IRL in June, and we’ve been together since. I love him, he loves me, and we see each other about once a month (I’m in California, and he’s in Colorado). And I’m planning to relocate after our trip together next summer
I love my superhero! Yay for internet romances!
Met my current girlfriend online…our story is rather weird when she tells it. I’m no good at telling stories.
I met my husband in Yahoo! chat. We started emailing each other, than started chatting on a very regular basis via ICQ. That was 3 1/2 years ago. Yesterday was the 3rd anniversary of him moving in with me officially. We’ve been married since June.
Heh. Online Romance…
My SO and I met a little more than 3 years ago. We were both on AOL at the time, and both frequented an…um…Animorphs chat room. (Animorphs was a children’s book series. It’s not so bad when you realize that, at the time, I was just barely 15, and he was younger). One day, he IMd me out of the blue and asked to RPG. We started an RPG that lasted about five months. Then, when that one ended, we started another one. At one point, I gave him my phone number, but I never expected him to call.
About a month after I gave him my number, I started getting these hang-up phone calls. Finally, after the third or fourth call, I Star-69’d, and found that it was an out-of-state number. I called it back–on a hunch–and found that it was him. Apparently, I sounded younger than 15 when I answered the phone, and he thought I was my little sister. Either that, or he was nervous ;).
Anyway, we started a “relationship” in September of '99 (We’d met in August of '98), although the relationship kinda waned, waxed, and sputtered. I finally made plans to drive to his house in July of 2000 and spend a day there (he lives about 6 and a half hours from me). We managed to break up the morning before I left. However, since he was my friend outside of the relationship context, I went to visit him anyway. And then realized that I didn’t want to be broken up with him.
We got back together in September of 2000, and shortly thereafter endured a period of time in which we were dating, but hating each other/sending email bombs/hardly talking. For no good reason. Finally, in February of 2001, we cleared out some issues that were still clouding things (my prior involvement in pseudo-teenage Satanism, his experimentation with recreational drugs, the exact ramifications of our break up before), and, since then, have been enjoying a healthy, yet exciting, relationship. The word “forever” has been tossed out. By me. The chick who can’t commit to a breakfast cereal. We try to arrange visits every month…and life is good.
The only problem is relocating. I’m now about 4 and a half hours away, as opposed to six, but, as he still lives with his parents (he’s 15), and I’m in college without a car (I’m 18; another “problem”), visiting gets tricky. He obviously can’t move, and he wants me to transfer to a college in Michigan. I don’t like where I’m going to school, and would love to transfer, but wouldn’t be able to handle the out of state tuition. sigh Wish I knew how to work this part out, but, hell, it’s worth the hassle.
My god, he pisses me off, sometimes. And I love it.