There are some serious creeps out there, on-line and off-, who ought to be strung up by their mousecables and given the Clockwork Orange treatment. However, at what may be an inopportune time, I offer the following story:
I met a woman over the Internet who lived in Los Angeles. (I live in a middle-sized Southern city.) We chatted, and talked on the phone nightly, and then she came to visit. Twice, even. And everything was WONDERFUL, and then she decided she couldn’t handle the trust issues involved in the long-distance relationship. I can understand that, I guess, even though I for some reason had no trouble trusting her. Anyway, I guess the short version of it is that there are good people out there looking for someone, and they sometimes meet each other, and in the luckiest of circumstances (which seem to happen more often than you’d think), those people live near to each other, and occasionally, things work out fine. I have a friend who married a woman he met on the Internet, and they, after about five years, are superlatively happy. (And they had to deal with a Memphis-to-Salt-Lake-City distance at first.)
So don’t despair. Sometimes it works, and when it does it’s magical and it’s the best thing in the world. When it doesn’t it’s terrible, but as Michael Strahan said, it’s not like we’re having to go out in the street and throw rocks at tanks.
So chin up; it will happen. And it never happens when you expect it. (I met the woman I lived with for six blissful years while eating a burrito one afternoon in 1993.)